Wave-particle duality is concerned with the dual nature of light. Specifically, the particle and wave nature of light. The particle nature of light is the little packages of photons that make up light, and the wave nature of light is the wave pattern that light follows. An example of a way that light behaves like a particle is that it can’t go through walls like sound can. Light also can behave like a wave when we observe the interference pattern of light. This dual nature of light is important because nothing else known in the universe behaves and can be described in the way that light is. Getting to the consensus that light is both a particle and a wave has been a heated debate for decades, and to this day imagining what light truly is, is not humanly possible due to our lack of experience with a wave-particle nature. This thesis explores the history of the debates on the nature of light, and how the modern view was accomplished.

Realtime understanding of one’s complete metabolic state is crucial to controlling weight and managing chronic illnesses, such as diabetes. This project represents the development of a novel breath acetone sensor within the Biodesign Institute’s Center for Bioelectronics and Biosensors. The purpose is to determine if a sensor can be manufactured with the capacity to measure breath acetone concentrations typical of various levels of metabolic activity. For this purpose, a solution that selectively interacts with acetone was embedded in a sensor cartridge that is permeable to volatile organic compounds. After 30 minutes of exposure to a range of acetone concentrations, a color change response was observed in the sensors. Requiring only exposure to a breath, these novel sensor configurations may offer non-trivial improvements to clinical and at-home measurement of lipid metabolic rate.

There has been a recent push to examine the materials that nature is able to synthesize and consider whether the materials that humans have invented are geomimetic in nature, and whether designing nature-inspired materials is economically and environmentally beneficial. Mesoporous silica represents a class of materials with pore sizes of 2-50 nm and has been studied in catalysis, separations, and drug delivery. It has generally been made using organosilicon precursors, but in this work, we demonstrate for the first time the successful synthesis of mesoporous silica with uniform mesoporosity of 10 nm using the mineral forsterite (Mg2SiO4) as a silica source, providing a potentially cheaper and more Earth-friendly route to making this technologically important material. Forsterite was synthesized by a solid-state chemistry route and underwent dissolution-reprecipitation in an aqueous acid solution containing the soft template surfactant, Pluronic P123. The formation of forsterite was confirmed with X-ray diffraction (XRD), the successful templating of surfactant was demonstrated with thermogravimetric analysis (TGA) and Fourier-transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR), the surface area was determined through Brunauer-Emmett-Teller (BET) analysis, and pore size and distribution were demonstrated with Barrett-Joyner-Halenda (BJH) analysis. The synthesized mesoporous silica at optimal conditions has surface area of 740 m2/g and pore volume of 1.4 mL/g.

The outlying cities of Phoenix's West Metropolitan experienced rapid growth in the past ten years. This trend is only going to continue with an average expected growth of 449-891% between 2000 and 2035 (ADOT, 2012). Phoenix is not new to growth and has consistently seen swaths of people added to its population. This raises the question of what happened to the people who lived in Phoenix's West Valley during this period of rapid change and growth in their communities? What are their stories and what do their stories reveal about the broader public history of change in Phoenix's West Valley? In consideration of these questions, the community oral histories of eight residents from the West Valley were collected to add historical nuance to the limited archival records available in the area. From this collection, the previous notion of "post-war boomtowns” describing Phoenix’s West Valley was revealed to be highly inaccurate and dismissive of the residents' experiences who lived and formed their lives there.

Chemistry has always played a foundational role in the synthesis of pharmaceuticals. With the rapid growth of the global population, the health and medical needs have also rapidly increased. In order to provide drugs capable of mediating symptoms and curing diseases, organic chemistry provides drug derivatives utilizing a limited number of chemical building blocks and privileged structures. Of these limited building blocks, this project explores Late–stage C–H functionalization of (iso)quinolines using abundant metal catalysis in order to achieve site-selective molecular modification.

In 2019, the World Health Organization stated that climate change and air pollution is the greatest growing threat to humanity. With a world population of close to 8 billion people, the rate of population growth continues to increase nearly 1.05% each year. As the world population grows, carbon dioxide emissions and climate change continue to accelerate. By observing increasing concentrations of greenhouse gas emissions in the atmosphere, scientists have correlated that the Earth’s temperature is increasing at an average rate of 0.13 degrees Fahrenheit each decade. In an effort to mitigate and slow climate change engineers across the globe have been eagerly seeking solutions to fight this problem. A new form of carbon dioxide mitigation technology that has begun to gain traction in the last decade is known as direct air capture (DAC). Direct air capture works by removing excess atmospheric carbon dioxide from the air and repurposing it. The major challenge faced with DAC is not capturing the carbon dioxide but finding a useful way to reuse the post-capture carbon dioxide. As part of my undergraduate requirements, I was tasked to address this issue and create my own unique design for a DAC system. The design was to have three major goals: be 100% self-sufficient, have net zero carbon emissions, and successfully repurpose excess carbon dioxide into a sustainable and viable product. Arizona was chosen for the location of the system due to the large availability of sunlight. Additionally, the design was to utilize a protein rich hydrogen oxidizing bacteria (HOB) known as Cupriavidus Necator. By attaching a bioreactor to the DAC system, excess carbon dioxide will be directly converted into a dense protein biomass that will be used as food supplements. In addition, my system was designed to produce 1 ton (roughly 907.185 kg) of protein in a year. Lastly, by utilizing solar energy and an atmospheric water generator, the system will produce its own water and achieve the goal of being 100% self-sufficient.