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  What Does ATP Hygiene Monitoring Tell Us About Dirty and Clean Surfaces in the Postharvest Produce Environment?

  Gauri Arora

  Introduction: The Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA) was enacted in 2011 to emphasize the prevention of foodborne illnesses in the food system. Within FSMA, the Produce Safety Rule (PSR) was the first rule with federal regulatory standards established for produce activities. One of the major components of the PSR is cleaning and sanitation in produce handling environments. To accommodate a wide variety of operations and equipment used, the regulation uses general terms for cleaning and sanitizing requirements, such as "adequately cleaned..." and "...when necessary and appropriate, sanitize...", which can be left to interpretation as to what constitutes adequately cleaned surfaces. Within the food industry, adenosine triphosphate (ATP) bioluminescence assay can be used to verify surface cleanliness, based on the reactivity of the luciferin-luciferase reagent with any ATP residue, resulting in light being emitted and measuring the presence of organic matter. ATP luminometer companies have set general thresholds of relative light unit (RLU) requirements, but there is lack of data on what these values mean in practice within different produce commodities and their environments.

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  Exploring Engineering at Yakima Products

  Rujul Buge

  An overview of my summer at Yakima and the many projects that I got to lead and work on. These touched on various areas of design and engineering, and taught me many things, like 3D modeling in Solidworks and leadership and communication skills. It also influenced my career aspirations for the future and I'm glad to have had this experience.

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  Designing and Assembling an Artificial Tendon Attachment Mechanism for the Quadruped Robot

  Clara Margaret Cywinski

  On a biomimetic quadruped robot, the attachment for the strings (which function as artificial tendons) was slipping, so this presentation details the way I fixed that problem. This includes learning Solidworks, 3D printing, and the engineering design process to collaboratively create a working method. While the focus of the presentation is the string attachment project, it also goes through a side project I did to learn solidworks and talks about an international conference on biomimetics and soft robotics.

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  "Accommodations are Not Charity": Qualitative Analysis and Community Based Participatory Research to Understand and Measure Successful Employment Experience of Autistic People

  Priya Niranjan Gadhe

  We first read and familiarized ourselves with transcripts of the interview data collected by our mentor, Dr. Raymaker. As said before, the data that we coded consisted of 64 interviews with autistic people with skilled training, 11 interviews with supervisors of autistic people and job coaches, and 8 key informant interviews all of whom talked about their own experiences with having autism and finding or working in skilled employment. We then moved on to using qualitative analysis by coding and finding key ideas in what we were analyzing. Then we moved on to creating bigger categories out of the key ideas we found and used verification, which is essentially asking how can we trust what we learned. The five major themes we found are the following: take a holistic approach to career planning and job selection, create neurodiversity-friendly workplace climates, support employee mental health, respect employees for who they are and value their contributions, and explore out-of-the-box and non-traditional solutions.

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  A Return to Symbiosis: the use of artificially applied endophytes to increase yield in hybrid poplar 717

  Farren Beatrice Groom

  Endophytes, bacteria and fungi that live within plants, have recently been found to supply hosts with nutrients and pathogen-resistance, which increases yield in plants living under poor conditions. As such, Intrinsyx Bio has developed an easy-application treatment of beneficial endophytes ("Apollo beads"), designed specifically for commercially grown poplar trees. The apollo beads were applied to hybrid poplars growing in the Willamette valley to see what effect they had on growth in a field setting. If successful, endophyte treatments could decrease fertilizer needs and environmental impact of commercially grown poplar while increasing yield and drought resistance. Our trial yielded no change in average biomass within the first year, but this may have been due to uncontrolled variables.

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  Developing a Method for Producing Hydrogel Beads Containing Encapsulated Cells for Bioremediation

  Celia Jean H'Almeida

  The overall project that I got to help work on aimed to use hydrogel beads to bioremediate water. The small hydrogel beads contained immobilized bacteria cells. When contaminated groundwater diffused through them, these bacteria could break down contaminants in water. The part of the project that I worked on focused on producing a large amount of uniform hydrogel beads. We worked on making the bead production setup more efficient.

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  Hemp-based, Sustainable, Compostable, and Affordable Menstrual Pads for Underserved Communities

  Emma Holden

  Over the summer, I worked in a chemical engineering lab at OSU. We looked at different menstrual hygiene pads currently on the market and compared them in terms of compostability and absorbency. Additionally, we looked at the absorbency ratio of hemp compared to cotton. Further studies will be done on the properties of hemp.

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  Mutant Viruses From Hell

  Quincy Rose Kapsch

  Studying the structure of Sufulobus Spindle Shaped virus could yield valuable insights into the evolution of viruses and early life. Found in acidic high temperature environments believed to be similar to those in which life first evolved, SSV's unique lemon shape may be the key to it's survival. Over the summer of 2022, Quincy helped mutate position 66 of SSV1. She also worked on inserting a fluorescent protein into SSV1.

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  Waste Plastic to Diesel Fuel in a Bench Scale Pyrolysis Reactor: Circularity in Plastics Recycling on the OSU Campus

  Molly Jayne McNulty

  The OSU CBEE research lab is converting plastics to farm diesel using a pyrolysis reactor. During the summer of 2022 the lab focused on conducting experiments with trash collected from the OSU campus including a collaboration with the Dutch Bros on campus. They also participated in several outreach activities including the S.E.S.E.Y camp and the Asian Celebration.

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  On Demand Engineering

  Miriam Ann Micek

  On Demand Engineering is a presentation that covers some of what I did on the Engineering and Operations Services team at HP Inc. through the example of a project I worked on. During the presentation I go step-by-step through the design process to show how I applied it to my project, which was to design a part that would protect a tool used by HP in their Research and Development. After presenting on that project, I briefly cover other skills and knowledge I acquired, such as NRTL regulations and wiring an electrical cabinet.

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  Data Verification with Natural Language Processing

  Dayanara Rodriguez

  This presentation focuses on training data for supervised machine learning and natural language processing. An example of the machine learning model is shown which is built through python.

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  Wind Power on the Go: Designing and Building Portable Wind Turbines

  Diego Lev Romero

  My presentation focuses on the work I did as an intern under Dr. Gupta at Portland State University. The main purpose of the internship was creating a portable wind turbine, and in the process learning about renewable energy, the electrical grid, and the scientific method. The presentation takes an in depth look into what I learned, and the experience I gained during the summer.

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  A Pocket of Wind: Methods of Transportable Wind Energy

  Esther Tefera Solomon

  This presentation covers the process of designing and building small-scale, portable wind turbines. Rough plans are included for a horizontal-axis wind turbine and a vertical-axis wind turbine, about 6ft tall and able to produce, ideally, at least 5V of DC current. The process of testing a hand-made bridge rectifier is detailed as well as the difficulties encountered.

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  Accommodations are Not Charity: Qualitative Analysis and Community Based Participatory Research to Understand and Measure Successful Employment Experience of Autistic People

  Samyukta Lekhana Vaddadi

  We first read and familiarized ourselves with transcripts of the interview data collected by our mentor, Dr. Raymaker. As said before, the data that we coded consisted of 64 interviews with autistic people with skilled training, 11 interviews with supervisors of autistic people and job coaches, and 8 key informant interviews all of whom talked about their own experiences with having autism and finding or working in skilled employment. We then moved on to using qualitative analysis by coding and finding key ideas in what we were analyzing. Then we moved on to creating bigger categories out of the key ideas we found and used verification, which is essentially asking how can we trust what we learned. The five major themes we found are the following: take a holistic approach to career planning and job selection, create neurodiversity-friendly workplace climates, support employee mental health, respect employees for who they are and value their contributions, and explore out-of-the-box and non-traditional solutions.

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  Pretty in Pink: Analyzing Microplastic Contamination in Hawaiian Coastal Ecosystems

  Elise ZhouYue Yu

  This presentation explores my experience conducting microplastic research on Hawaiian mangrove and coastal ecosystems. As a non-native species to Hawaii, mangroves can be both beneficial and detrimental to its surrounding ecosystems. While they are generally a valuable resource in preventing erosion and providing food & habitat to various organisms, they can also harbor invasive species. Furthermore, the additional three-dimensional structure provided by the roots can encourage the accumulation of microplastics and other anthropogenic particles. Analyzing the presence of microplastics within mangrove ecosystems provides insight into this topic, as well as where & how microplastics collect in the environment.