Digital Commons Network^™

Roles For The Ventromedial Prefrontal Cortex In Resistance To Acute Social Stress, Johnathon Grizzell

Doctoral Dissertations

The ventromedial aspect of the prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) is an evolutionarily conserved region of the frontal lobe with primary roles in social processing and emotional regulation. During particularly stressful situations, neurons of the vmPFC are recruited and, through dynamic circuit-based activity patterns, help the organism integrate pertinent sensory cues and act in a context-specific manner. In the dissertation that follows, I discuss investigations of vmPFC neural and immune system activity as they confer resilience and susceptibility, respectively, to the effects of acute social defeat stress in male Syrian hamsters. We have previously shown that vmPFC neural activity, as indexed by …

Evaluating Climate Change Impacts On Drinking Water Reservoirs And Wastewater System Resilience In Connecticut, U.S.A., Cristina Mullin

Doctoral Dissertations

Societies depend on the proper functioning and resilience of critical infrastructure systems including those for drinking water and wastewater, but these systems are vulnerable to natural and anthropogenic stressors. For example, wastewater systems are especially susceptible to extreme weather events while drinking water systems are vulnerable to diminished source water quality — both of which can disrupt proper functioning. Climate change and human development, economic problems, and pollution further challenge water system resilience. Despite the criticality of these systems and known vulnerabilities, little scholarship exists that aims to interrogate their resilience. This dissertation attempts to narrow this gap in the …

An Examination Of Efficacy And Resilience In College Students: Influences On Socially Responsible Leadership, Paula Berry Atkins

Doctoral Dissertations

My study explored socially responsible leadership and its relationship to leader efficacy and resilience in college students. The investigation also examined the role of gender and race in these relationships. The study employed the Multi-Institutional Study of Leadership (MSL), which assesses student and educational outcomes relevant to the values underlying the Social Change Model of Student Leadership. The MSL utilizes the Socially Responsible Leadership Scale (Tyree, 1998) as a foundation but also includes measures of leader efficacy and resilience. Utilizing archival data from the 2015 administration of the MSL, my sample (N=840) included equal numbers of males and females equally …

Evaluating The Effectiveness Of Peer Engagement And Knowledge (Peak): A Community-Based Group Intervention For Youth In Hawai‘I, Jennifer T. T. Ho

Doctoral Dissertations

This study is a program evaluation with a mixed methods design that evaluated the effectiveness of Peer Engagement and Knowledge (PEAK), a six-week community-based group intervention that incorporates mindfulness-based interventions (MBIs) to address multiple health behaviors for multiracial youth in Hilo, Hawai‘i. A total of 51 youth, ages 12-23 years old, participated in this study which included pre-/posttest analyses of health risk factors such as substance use and depression and health promoting factors such as resilience, self-esteem, and mindfulness. Responses from two subsets of participants, who engaged in a focus group (n = 11) and composed gratitude letters ( …

Coverage And Time-Optimal Motion Planning For Autonomous Vehicles, Junnan Song

Doctoral Dissertations

Autonomous vehicles are rapidly advancing with a variety of applications, such as area surveillance, environment mapping, and intelligent transportation. These applications require coverage and/or time-optimal motion planning, where the major challenges include uncertainties in the environment, motion constraints of vehicles, limited energy resources and potential failures. While dealing with these challenges in various capacities, this dissertation addresses three fundamental motion planning problems: (1) single-robot complete coverage in unknown environment, (2) multi-robot resilient and efficient coverage in unknown environment, and (3) time-optimal risk-aware motion planning for curvature-constrained vehicles.

First, the ε* algorithm is developed for online coverage path planning in unknown …