I wish to express my sincere gratitude to Stephen A. Ficca and F. Anthony Clifford of the National Institutes of Health for their continued support. I am especially thankful to George Williams who supported me throughout this project. Without his belief in my mission and vision, none of these accomplishments would have been conceivable. He helped me turn my ideas and theories into reality.

Special thanks go to the following people for their generous assistance in reviewing this document and providing advice and assistance throughout the development of the project: Mr. Ed Driscoll of NIH, Dr. Melvin First of Harvard University, Dr. Cherie Fisk of NIH, Dr. Christopher Gordon of the United States Environmental Protection Agency, Mr. J. R. "Mike" Harrison of NIH, Dr. C. Max Lang of Penn State University, Dr. Neil Lipman of Cornell University, Mr. John Nelson of Affiliated Engineers Inc., Dr. Arthur W. O'Brien of NIH, Dr. James Raber of NIH, Dr. Gerald Riskowski of University of Illinois, Dr. Bill White of Charles River Laboratory, and Dr. Thomas Wolfle of Institute of Laboratory Animal Resources. I am especially grateful to Dr. C. Max Lang and Dr. Bill White for their unprecedented efforts and support in making this study possible.

I wish to acknowledge several people at the University of Illinois Bioenvironmental Engineering Research Laboratory (BERL) for helping to make this project a success. The extensive experimental portion of this project was conducted in collaboration with the BERL group to obtain physical data to help establish boundary conditions and verification for the computational fluid dynamics, as well as the mouse heat, moisture, and ammonia mass production data. I am especially indebted to Dr. Gerald Riskowski for leading the BERL group. I appreciated his patience, support, and belief in the goal of this project. I am also grateful to the other members of the BERL team, as follows: Dr. Paul Harrison, Dr. Yuanhui Zhang, Dr. Mike Tumbleson, and research assistants Jing Wei Su, Chris Shaffer, Ling Ying Zhao, Steve Ford, and Naxin Zheng who helped me to create such an unprecedented work.

I am most grateful to Dr. Christopher Gordon of the Neurotoxicology Division of the United States Environmental Protection Agency for conducting further research on behavioral thermoregulatory responses of single- and group-housed mice. His findings were used as one of the main parameters for evaluations of different scenarios in this research. Without his work it would have been impossible to do ours. His initiative, interest, and efforts far surpassed my expectations.

I would also like to express my utmost appreciation and gratitude to the following members of my team for their strong support: Dr. Christopher Aldham, Dr. Andrew Manning, Dr. Farzad Baban, Dr. Robin Bornoff, Mark Seymour, and Jonathan Leppard of Flomerics Ltd. I would like to extend special thanks to Dr. Christopher Aldham and Dr. Andrew Manning for bringing their extensive experience in numerical modeling and analysis to this project.

Also, I am grateful to everyone who participated in the progress meetings for their valuable input. To single out any other of the multitude of scientists, engineers, and specialists who have influenced and assisted me in this project would be unjust, but I would like to make this a collective acknowledgment of their valued contributions. Last, I would like to express my appreciation to my editor, Ann Cochran, who made this book easier to read.

Farhad Memarzadeh
Principal Investigator