The Kittanning coal seams run underneath West Virginia, southeast Ohio, and southwestern Pennsylvania. It is part of a sequence that underlies the Freeport and Pittsburgh coals. All three seams are of Pennsylvanian Age. Of the seams in the Northern Appalachian Basin, the Kittanning has the among the largest extents. For that reason, it will most likely be the greatest influencer on population patterns. Since the early 1800s, the people of the region mined and used coal to produce their energy. As such, it is the goal of this research is to determine the spatial relationship between the economic coal sources and population centers.

Landslides may be caused naturally or triggered by human activities and have enormous societal and economic impacts. Detecting and mapping landslides through the generation of landslide susceptibility maps (LSM) and understanding the factors that trigger these processes will be helpful in land use planning and risk assessments. Moreover, it will also assist landslide mitigation efforts by controlling anthropogenic-led processes that induce landslides. This study deals with the analysis to identify slow-moving landslides in Travis County, Texas. It combines geographic information systems(GIS) and remote sensing datasets and techniques to generate an LSM of the study area and identify ground displacements. Remote sensing data provide key information about the topography and land uses, combined with controlling factors for a landslide occurrence such as slope, geology/soil and geological structures, and vegetation/land uses to perform an empirical approximation to map and assess landslide susceptibility. Once the susceptible areas are identified, analysis for ground displacement is applied using a Synthetic Aperture Radar Interferometric (InSAR) technique referred to as the Small Baseline Subset (SBAS) and field-based multitemporal Real-Time Kinematic (RTK) GPS measurements.

The Ouachita Trough is a basin that formed along a passive margin on the southern border of Laurentia caused by the Precambrian–Cambrian rifting of Rodinia and the opening of the Iapetus Ocean. The collision of Laurentia and Gondwana and the closing of the Iapetus Ocean thrust sediments from the Ouachita Trough onto the southern portion of the North American craton to form the Ouachita Mountains. The Ouachita Trough transitioned from a sediment-starved basin into an area of rapid sediment accumulation during the Mississippian. The Stanley Group, of interest in this study, was deposited prior to the collision of the encroaching Gondwana continent to the south. Although there have been many previous studies aiming to determine the provenance history of the Stanley Group, the results are inconclusive. In this study, nine samples from turbidite deposits of the Stanley Group were processed using both U-Pb age dating and core rim analysis. Laurentia and Gondwana have similar aged terranes that are difficult to differentiate. Using core rim analysis allowed us to date both the age of the core and rim of individual zircon grains. We were then able to correlate zircon grains of similar ages to their sources. By analyzing a large area of the Ouachita Mountains, this study shows that the Stanley Group consists of sediments sourced from both Laurentia and Gondwana terranes to the south.

The Urban Heat Island (UHI) effect is characterized by the differential heating of densely populated urban areas in comparison to surrounding areas. Increased temperatures caused by buildings and other man-made infrastructure have a wide range of human and ecological impacts. One emerging methodology to combat UHI effects is the implementation of urban green spaces and trees. Trees can provide two main functions that aid in cooling; shade from the sun provided by the canopy and cooling through the process of evapotranspiration. This project aims to identify which species of tree best suits the ecoregion of Fort Worth, how much feasible green space Fort Worth can provide, and project the cooling the green spaces could provide if they are planted with trees.

The use of Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar (InSAR) to analyze the deformation of the Earth's surface has become an increasingly important tool for monitoring earthquakes, volcanic activity, landslides, and land subsidence. This process works by calculating the phase differences of radar signals reflected from the Earth's surface over a period of time. If the land has uplifted or subsided, the phase of the two radar signals will interfere. The image this phase difference produces is known as an interferogram, which shows the ground-surface displacement of the target area across the two time periods. This technique has been used extensively to survey Mexico City, which has been an area of concern since the beginning of the 20th century due to its dramatic rate of ground subsidence.

Nanomaterials are the new technologies reforming industrial activities. They are used to improve energy efficiency and storage, to cheaply store and process information in every internet server and personal computer, to facilitate bio-imaging and drug delivery, and in environmental remediation. These materials’ nanometric dimension, 1/100000 the width of a human hair, allows them to have novel characteristics such as strength, electrical resistivity, and conductivity, and optical absorption compared to the same materials in bigger sizes. Due to their widespread and incorporation into consumer products, it is important to understand their interactions with other elements in the environment. I used flow experiments, to understand the effects of the core and terminal groups chemistries of 3 sets of nanomaterials on their interaction with ferrihydrite, a very common and reactive mineral in the environment. The nanomaterials used in this study, namely Graphene Quantum Dot (GQD), PAMAM G4-OH, and PAMAM G3.5-COOH, have comparable sizes, 6nm, 4.5 nm, and 3.5 nm, respectively. When the experiments were conducted under acidic and circumneutral pH, the quantities of GQD and PAMAM G4-OH sorbed were equivalent and less than the quantity of PAMAM G3.5-COOH sorbed. In my presentation, I will go over the quantities and kinetics results from the interactions of the 3 sets of nanomaterials onto ferrihydrite over environmentally significant pH values (range 3-10).

Land surface temperature is a major factor used in the assessment and understanding of several processes including global climate, hydrological, geo-/biophysical, urban land use/land cover (Avdan and Jovanovska, 2016). Since the Soviet Union launched the world's first artificial satellite, Sputnik 1, in 1957 there have been about 8,900 satellites from more than 40 countries launched in space that have opened possibilities to understand the earth using remote sensing. Specifically, LANDSAT 8’s thermal infrared sensor Band 10 data has been successfully used to map land surface temperature. The specific algorithm used to derive land surface temperature from LANDSAT 8’s thermal infrared sensor Band 10 showed standard deviations of 2.4°C and 2.7°C on the first trial and second trial respectively (Avdan and Jovanovska, 2016). In my project, I used land surface temperature in addition to secondary data (geologic features, volcanoes, faults, change in cities' extents) to locate and deduce the potential geothermal plays in Rwanda. I also compared the potential geothermal plays obtained using remote sensing to those obtained using ground measurements to assess how accurate remote sensing tools are in determining geothermal plays.

Mount Rainier is a stratovolcano within the Cascade Arc situated southeast of the cities of Seattle and Tacoma. This region of Washington has undergone substantial population growth while being situated in the shadow of a large stratovolcano. Historically lahar flows, volcanoclastic debris flows, from the volcano have reached as far as Tacoma and could still pose a risk to Seattle and other smaller communities. Seismicity and annual precipitation are large contributors into predicting an eruption event as well as eruption severity. Using ArcGIS Pro and implementing various types of data including historic lahar deposit extent, population growth, seismic activity, and other contributions that can peer into a future volcanic eruption, it can be possible to assess the volcanic hazard Mount Rainier poses on nearby communities.

Treatment of complex conditions, such as cancer, has been substantially advanced by a field of molecular therapeutics. However, many of these therapies are limited by the dose toxicity and lack the predictive power of tomography-guided approaches. Nanomaterial platforms can address these drawbacks, safely delivering therapeutics, concomitantly imaging their delivery pathways, and presenting sites for targeting agent attachment. Graphene quantum dots (GQDs) possess physical properties that are critical for biomedical applications, including small size (3-5 nm), high quantum yield, low cytotoxicity, and pH-dependent fluorescence emission. Thus, our work utilizes nitrogen-doped GQDs as a basis for targeted image-guided cancer therapy. GQDs serve as an emissive platform for covalent attachment of a targeting agent (hyaluronic acid (HA) targeted to the CD44 receptors on several cancer cell types) and oxidative stress-based cancer therapeutic (ferrocene (Fc)). The synthesized multifunctional formulation is characterized and its efficacy evaluated in vitro. Elemental mapping indicates that the purified from reactants synthetic product has an average iron content of 0.64 atomic percent, suggesting the successful attachment of the therapeutic, while FFT analysis of TEM images confirms the crystalline structure of the GQDs. Although GQDs alone yield no cytotoxicity as quantified via the MTT assay up to the maximum imaging concentrations of 1 mg/mL, the Fc-HA-GQD formulation exhibits a higher cytotoxic response in the cancer cells (HeLa) targeted by the HA as opposed to healthy ones (HEK-293) that do not overexpress CD44, suggesting cancer-selective targeted treatment. As Fc induces oxidative stress that is less mitigated in cancer cells, we expect it to also contribute to the observed cancer-selective treatment response. As a result, we propose Fc-HA-GQD formulation as a multifunctional targeted delivery, imaging, and cancer-specific treatment agent further to be studied in vivo.

Fluorescence has proved itself to be a useful tool in a wide variety of fields, ranging from environmental sensing to biomedical diagnostics. In this study, we propose to utilize a fluorescence-based technique called Surface Plasmon Coupled Emission (SPCE) to monitor molecular binding and to detect low concentrations of physiological markers (e.g. biomarkers present in the human body as a result of a disease). SPCE is characterized by directional emission that allows for a superior sensitivity and selectivity for detection. The development of an SPCE-based detection platform will allow for simple, fast and sensitive detection in a compact configuration that can be relatively easily implemented in the field or in primary care offices. Surface plasmon induced fluorescence at the interface of a thin metal layer (e.g. 50 nm of silver or gold) and a dielectric (e.g. glass) allows for highly enhanced excitation of fluorophores deposited on top of the metal film and very efficient detection due to the directional nature of this emission. As a result, we expect highly improved detection sensitivity compared to other fluorescence detection methods or other surface detection methods such as surface plasmon attenuated reflection (SPR).