Digital Commons Network^™

Beach Pollution Messaging: Effects Of Negativity/Loss And Fear Appeals On Perceived Threat And Beach Protection Intentions, Cypress Brice

Communication Studies

Beach and ocean pollution are major environmental issues for all communities, but they have an especially deep impact on coastal communities, where beaches are part of everyday life. Marine pollution includes both chemical pollution and trash, and a lot of it starts from land-based human activity before it reaches the ocean. This study examines how different messaging styles about beach pollution affect how people respond to the issue and whether they feel motivated to help protect beaches and oceans. Using an online experiment, participants viewed one of two beach pollution posters and then answered questions about their reaction to the …

Doomscrolling, Algorithms, And Ai Literacy: A Potent Combination Of Influence On Generation Z, Jacob Le

Communication Studies

This study examines the doomscrolling habits Generation Z’s and its effects on individuals’ awareness of algorithms and artificial intelligence (AI) presence on social media feeds. The experiment was conducted via a survey embedded experiment, through which participants self-reported their social media habits, awareness of how their social media algorithms shape their thinking, and ability to discern and productively interact with AI content on their feeds. The survey embedded experiment was created and distributed via Qualtrics, and data was analyzed via IBM SPSS 25. Results indicated that doomscrolling and spending excessive amounts of time on social media daily does not necessarily …

An Analysis Of Immigration Frames In The News Media Post- Second Trump Administration, Olivia Hartley

Communication Studies

Immigration has been a particularly controversial issue since the 2nd Trump Administration. There has been an increase in Immigration Customs Enforcement activity, including deportations and detainments of immigrants across the United States (Craft & Witherspoon, 2026). Given the uptick in media coverage regarding these events, it is essential to understand how this information is being presented to the public. The framing of news media impacts how the public perceives issues, determining the acceptable treatment of immigrants in our society. In this study, a content analysis was performed to determine the prevalence of generic immigration news frames following the start of …

Addressing Housing Crisis In Reedley, California: A Conceptual Housing Development Proposal, Fabian Urena-Marquez

City and Regional Planning

No abstract provided.

Examining How Student Involvement And Identity Shapes Perceptions Of Cal Poly Administrative Communication And Organizational Change, Ellenor Rose Nunes

Communication Studies

This study examined the relationship between student organization involvement, sense of belonging, and perceptions of administration at California Polytechnic State University (Cal Poly). Using survey data collected from 176 students, independent samples t-tests and correlation analyses were conducted in SPSS Version 25 to examine whether involvement in student organizations was associated with perceptions of administration and institutional belonging. Results indicated no significant relationship between levels of involvement and perceptions of administration or organizational change communication. However, students involved in student organizations reported significantly greater feelings of mattering and belonging compared to non-involved students. Additionally, students with stronger feelings of belonging …

City Farm Slo: A Case Study Of Nonprofit Regenerative Agriculture, Carver Tunnell

Master's Theses

The focus of this thesis is to create a case study on City Farm SLO, a nonprofit based in San Luis Obispo, California, that has engaged in education and regenerative agriculture on City owned land since 2013. This case study is intended for use in undergraduate agribusiness and natural resource management courses, to encourage thoughtful discussion surrounding nonprofit and regenerative agricultural systems. The case presents the nonprofit at a time of relative success, having recently secured a lease renewal, extending stewardship 40 years into the future. However, the reliance on grants and donations threatens the security of the operation going …

Rolling Garden Box, Lucas Meneghetti, Gabe Haarberg, Alex Seybold, Matthew Podgorski

Baker/Koob Endowments Awarded Projects

The Rolling Garden Box project was successfully completed and delivered to Heather McColley, project sponsor and Special Day Class instructor at Oceano Elementary School, on June 3, 2026. The project met all original design objectives and was well received by both staff and students. The final product provides an accessible gardening experience for all students. The garden box features a wheelchair-accessible design, a mobile platform with locking caster wheels, and a switch-activated watering system that responds reliably to student inputs. The system allows students to independently control the watering process, reinforcing cause-and-effect learning in a hands-on environment outside the traditional …

Century's Nail Spa Rebrand, Alena Le Thai

Graphic Communication

For my senior project, I redesigned branding for Century’s Nail Spa, an Asian-owned family business located in Fremont, California. My family purchased this nail salon from a former work colleague after the pandemic. We inherited the branding and the website at the time and did not make the effort to change or strengthen these business aspects since the change in ownership. Therefore, I decided to rebrand the nail salon to better align with our family values, culture and desire to connect with the local community. Along with designing a brand guide with new logos and color palette, I also redesigned …

Toe's Lighters And Accessories, Ryan M. Nolan

Graphic Communication

This senior project focused on creating a cohesive advertising campaign for Theo’s Lighters, a student-owned business that refurbishes and resells collectible lighters. The campaign included a promotional video and a branded product catalog designed to strengthen the company’s visual identity and broaden its audience. By combining photography, videography, graphic design, typography, and sound design, the project presented the products as style-oriented accessories connected to sustainability, self-expression, and contemporary campus culture. The completed campaign demonstrates the effectiveness of integrated visual storytelling while showcasing professional skills in branding, multimedia production, and user-focused design.

Operation Bite Block, Jennifer Aline Robles, Laura Marie Strobbe, William Pearce Graham, Annabelle Katherine Thalken

Mechanical Engineering

Current dental bite blocks, or mouth props, are typically manufactured in fixed sizes, and often result in patient discomfort, reduced procedural efficiency, and the need for dental offices to maintain multiple product sizes. This project sought to design, prototype, and validate an adjustable dental bite block capable of accommodating a wide range of patient mouth openings while maintaining comfort, structural integrity, sterilizability, and operator usability. Working in collaboration with Dr. Alan Latta, a practicing dentist in San Luis Obispo, the design process incorporated stakeholder feedback, patent and market research, engineering analysis, and iterative prototyping to develop a solution that addresses …

Mars Rover Wheels And Drive, Presley S. Sacavitch, Ryan W. Trevena, Dylan A. Mack, Daniel Hudak

Mechanical Engineering

Cal Poly’s Poly1Rover team, advised by Professor Rich Murray, aims to deploy four student-designed mini-Mars rovers, each equipped with a sample-tube retrieval claw, before 2030. However, the wheels of Poly1Rover’s current 6th generation rover are not ready for deployment to Mars, as they do not utilize space-grade materials, are not optimized for manufacturability, and lack sufficient spoke compliance to absorb landing and high-impact loads. This project will be developed by a team of Mechanical Engineering students at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo (Cal Poly): Daniel Hudak, Dylan Mack, Presley Sacavitch, and Ryan Trevena. Next Intent is providing funding …

Formula Sae Planetary Gearbox Characterization Dynamometer, Trevor Marco Toma, Thomas Welden Pierce, Ethan Liu

Mechanical Engineering

This report outlines a custom hub motor dynamometer requested by the Cal Poly Racing FSAE team. The need for this testing platform is to characterize an existing Formula SAE planetary gearbox for a proposed 4WD powertrain. Hub motors, compact electric machines integrated directly into each outboard wheel, offer significant advantages in efficiency, traction, and chassis packaging compared to conventional RWD drivetrains. By mapping torque capacity, efficiency, lubrication method effectiveness, and fatigue life, the team can validate gearbox design and performance.

This senior project group designed and built a dynamometer according to these specifications which will allow for successful testing to …

On The Number Of Ways To Express A Set As A Union Of Individually Interesting Sets, Alison Watson

Master's Theses

In a dataset that contains what ought rightly to be several distinct datasets placed in juxtaposition with each other, grouping datapoints based on observed similarities can be done in many ways. Topological Data Analysis (TDA) is a field of math that seeks to impose geometric structure onto datasets, thereby translating problems in statistics to problems in geometry or topology. A common truism in this field is “Data has shape and shape has meaning.” In this thesis, we use combinatorial and categorical arguments to demonstrate some shortcomings of a TDA approach on a class of inverse problems inspired by marine wildlife …

50,000 Spectra And Counting: Preparing For A Roman Spectral Atlas, Maya Jordan Seagraves

Master's Theses

Slitless spectroscopy with the Hubble Space Telescope's Wide Field Camera 3 \linebreak (WFC3/IR) enables simultaneous spectral coverage of all sources in a field, but large-scale single-orientation datasets remain challenging to process. We developed a pipeline that automates HSTaXe spectral extraction across hundreds of Hubble Space Telescope observations, enabling efficient processing of 84 fields and producing over 50,000 spectra from three filters (F110W, F125W, and F160W) and two grisms (G102 and G141). This was achieved by creating a companion Python package, the Module for Infrared Label Analysis (MILA), that integrates data calibration, extraction, and visualization. To assess the scientific utility of …

Dot Product Engine Based Neuromorphic Hardware For Continuous-Time Biomedical Signal Classification, Sanjeev Srinivasan

Master's Theses

Accurate diagnosis of pathological conditions from biomedical signals, such as electrocardiograms (ECGs) is often performed offline, making it time-consuming, costly, and inefficient, especially when abnormal patterns are rare and long-term monitoring generates large amounts of data. To address this, this work proposes a compact, scalable, and programmable neuromorphic system designed for real-time preliminary arrhythmia detection and classification using ECG signals, that can be extended to other biomedical signals. The proposed design processes ECG signals using a delta modulation-based spike encoder, followed by classification with a dot-product engine (DPE) based spiking neural network (SNN) processor and winner-take-all (WTA) circuit. The architecture …

Evaluation Of Solar Reflective Pigments For Use In Direct-To-Metal Coatings, William J. Diment

Master's Theses

Solar reflective coatings offer a promising strategy to mitigate the urban heat island effect by reducing absorption of near-infrared solar energy. This thesis project investigates the feasibility of incorporating near-infrared reflective pigments into waterborne direct-to-metal (DTM) latex coating systems while maintaining acceptable color comparison characteristics and coating performance. An all acrylic latex DTM formulation with titanium dioxide as the sole pigment was prepared and tinted with a variety of conventional and solar reflective commercial colorants across the yellow, red, blue, and green color ranges. Coatings were evaluated for solar reflectance, CIELAB color, gloss, contrast ratio, rheological behavior, accelerated ultraviolet weathering …

On M-Estimation: From Theory To Examples, Alexander Yuan

Master's Theses

M-estimation provides a unified framework for statistical procedures defined as optimizers of data-dependent criterion functions. This thesis gives an expository account of M-estimation in classical and high-dimensional settings. The classical part develops weak convergence, empirical process tools, and the argmax framework for studying consistency, rates of convergence, and weak limits. Examples including least squares, maximum likelihood, robust location estimation, change-point estimation, and empirical risk minimization illustrate regular and non-regular asymptotic behavior.

The high-dimensional part studies regularized M-estimators, where the focus shifts to finite-sample error bounds and model selection guarantees. Topics include decomposable regularizers, restricted strong convexity, non-convex penalties, and sparsistency. …

Independent And Combined Effects Of Early-Life Iron Deficiency And Antibiotic Exposure On Growth And Hematological Outcomes In A Piglet Model, Ginger M. Fitzpatrick

Master's Theses

Iron deficiency (ID) affects over 2 billion individuals globally. Children under 5 are at increased risk of ID due to rapid growth and are especially vulnerable to its negative consequences because of iron’s essential role in cognitive development and immune maturation. ID is the leading cause of iron deficiency anemia (IDA), with IDA affecting approximately 40% of children in this age group. Antibiotic (abx) exposure is also prevalent during early life and may disrupt growth and through gut dysbiosis, with increasing use posing additional risk in younger populations. Geographically, there is overlap in regions with high anemia prevalence and those …

High-Resolution Queries, Low-Resolution Context: Scaling Vision Transformers With Asymmetric Spatial Reduction, James M. Dwyer

Master's Theses

Vision Transformers (ViTs) have demonstrated great performance on image classifica tion benchmarks, however, the quadratic complexity of the self-attention mechanism with respect to sequence length limits their scalability to higher resolution inputs. The attention score matrix grows as O(N2) in both compute and memory, where N is the number of patch tokens, making ViTs computationally expensive and memory intensive for applications that require real-time inference or operate under resource constraints.

This thesis investigates whether the key and value sequences of the self-attention mechanism can be compressed using the local spatial structure of the image — while keeping queries at full …

Effects Of Atomic Oxygen Exposure On Stressed Drag Sail Materials For Low Earth Orbit Applications, Nazanin Sadeghian Dezaki

Master's Theses

As low Earth orbit (LEO) has become an increasingly valuable region for satellite operations, it has grown increasingly congested. The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) deorbit regulations require satellites to be deorbited within 5 years of launch, and drag sails represent a practical means of meeting this requirement. An important consideration for drag sail design is the effect of atomic oxygen (AO) on sail materials. To address the gap in the literature regarding the behavior of stressed drag sail materials under AO exposure, a new test plate was manufactured for the California Polytechnic State University minimum atmospheric experimentation (MAX) AO chamber. …

A Higher Order Panel Method With Vortex Particle Wake, Luca Flick-Kaiser

Master's Theses

Panel codes were some of the earliest methods for computing the flow around aircraft. Despite the availability of higher fidelity CFD methods, panel methods remain an essential tool for the development of modern aircraft, allowing engineers to quickly iterate during the conceptual design phase.

This work develops and implements a high order panel method using Python. The wake is modeled using vortex particles, resulting in an accurate wake representation with minimal user input. The integration of the higher order singularity distributions has been extended to include the calculation of the velocity gradients necessary for the vortex particle implementation. The use …

Development Of A Free-Floating Space Robotic Simulator, Truman: Terrestrial Robotic Unit For Multibody Analysis And Navigation, Jackson W. Cordova

Master's Theses

This work describes the development of a 3 Degree-of-Freedom (DOF) robotic manipulator for use on a free-floating planar air-bearing vehicle. The system developed aims to serve as a foundation for future space robotics research at the California Polytechnic State University (Cal Poly)’s Space Robotics Laboratory. Systems doc- umentation describes conceptual operation and architecture of the proposed system: Terrestrial Robotic Unit for Multibody Analysis and Navigation (TRUMAN). The key operation of TRUMAN is to study a self launch maneuver of a free-floating ve- hicle including 4 distinct phases: launch off a fixed rail, coast, reorientation using manipulator motion, and capture of …

Prototype X-Band Front End Upconverter & Transmitter With An Integrated Pll, Mont Ziadoon Murad

Master's Theses

In recent years, there has been growing interest in high-speed communication for small satellites. Achieving higher communication speeds will enable any experimental CubeSat to conduct experiments at higher rates and allow further research into SAR and deep-space exploration. At Cal Poly, the CubeSat Lab has mainly operated at 9600 baud and utilized the Ultra High Frequency (UHF) amateur radio band. While it has proven itself resilient, the UHF band lacks the infrastructure to support higher-bandwidth communication systems. To address this gap, this work presents a prototype space-side downlink RF front end comprising an upconverter, a power amplifier (PA), and a …

Scorespeak: An Agentic System For Natural Language Control Of Musical Scores, Nathan S. Lim

Master's Theses

With the recent popularization of large language models (LLMs), natural language has become one of the most accessible and powerful ways for people to interact with creative tools. Although they have become common in mainstream domains like image and audio editing, there is currently no robust AI-based system that can reliably turn free-form language into edits for symbolic musical scores. This gap represents a missed opportunity to improve human workflows for creating and editing sheet music, but it is also a fundamental limitation for other agentic music systems; without a robust mechanism for translating free-form language into structured scores, AI …

From Seizure To Settlement: Liberated Africans, Imperial Law, And Labor In The Indian Ocean World, 1810–1860, Holly S. Mcfate

Master's Theses

This thesis examines the relationship between British antislavery, imperial law, and labor management in the western Indian Ocean during the first half of the nineteenth century. Centered on the 1821 capture and condemnation of the slave schooner Industry by HMS Menai, the study employs a microhistorical methodology to reconstruct the legal and administrative processes that governed the lives of Africans seized from slave ships after their liberation. Drawing upon Vice-Admiralty Court records, Colonial Office correspondence, naval logbooks, and administrative registers from The National Archives (UK) and the Mauritius Archives, the thesis follows the transition of captive Africans from maritime interception …

Development Of A Video-Based Tool To Measure Motor Asymmetry In Infants At Risk For Hemiparesis, Roha Ali

Master's Theses

Congenital hemiparesis is a unilateral motor impairment stemming from brain injury in utero or early postnatally. Hemiparesis can be difficult to detect in early infancy with current clinical tools. Yet, early identification of motor asymmetry could play a key role in the design of effective early intervention and rehabilitation strategies. This thesis presents the development and validation of a video-based tool designed to extract infant limb movement data using DeepLabCut’s (DLC) machine learning network. The pipeline was developed using videos of typically developing (TD) infants and infants with Asymmetric Perinatal Brain Injury (APBI), all at or under 3 months corrected …

A Security Framework For Pacemaker Lead Failure: Anomaly Detection System And Failsafe Policy Considerations, Ethan Wagner

Master's Theses

Embedded system security in implantable medical devices (IMDs) remains an underexplored challenge due to the unique constraints of these systems. Specifically, pacemakers are optimized for ultra-low power consumption to maximize device lifespan, are highly resource constrained, and demand reliable and correct operation to prevent severe health consequences. These systems rely on sensing electrodes, called leads, to detect cardiac activity and stimulate the patient’s heart when appropriate. Therefore, pacemaker lead integrity is a critical issue, as malfunction or compromise can result in device failure jeopardizing patient safety.

The security framework presented in this thesis integrates several works to proactively detect and …

Large Scale Kmer-Based Proteomic Analysis: An Application Towards Evolutionary Constraint Discovery, Matthew Chak

Master's Theses

Large protein databases now make it possible to study short peptides across natural protein sequence space at unprecedented scale, but exhaustively counting k-mers across billions of protein sequences remains computationally difficult. This thesis develops an exact amino-acid k-mer counting method based on direct addressing, in which fixed-length amino-acid strings are encoded as base-20 integers and updated with a sliding-window recurrence. By avoiding key storage and collision resolution, this approach removes overhead inherent to hash-map-based methods when the k-mer space is sufficiently dense. A memory analysis shows when direct addressing is preferable to open-addressing hash tables, and expected-saturation calculations motivate its …

Perception Is Reality: Evaluating Transportation Satisfaction And Utilization In Continuing Student Housing At Cal Poly, Lucas Owens

Master's Theses

As higher education institutions increasingly mandate on-campus living to foster student success, the built environment becomes a critical determinant of daily mobility. California Polytechnic State University (Cal Poly) is transitioning to a two-year residency requirement and tightening vehicle restrictions. This thesis evaluates how the spatial and built-environment realities of peripheral housing complexes in Cerro Vista Apartments and Poly Canyon Village shape student transportation satisfaction and utilization, and emergency evacuation preparedness.

Employing a mixed-methods approach, this research triangulates data from 79 student surveys and 10 semi-structured interviews. The findings indicate that supplementing traditional metrics of proximity with localized spatial data presents …

Structured Dynamic Factor Analysis Of Environmental Time Series With Application To Morro Bay Estuary, Jose Garcia

Master's Theses

This thesis develops a structured dynamic factor analysis (sDFA) framework for decomposing multivariate environmental time series into latent biological and physical components. The methodology is applied to five years of high-resolution passive monitoring data collected from two sites in Morro Bay, California from 2020 through 2024. Relative contribution indices are developed based on the structured DFA that measure how much each latent process contributes to each observed variable at any given time. Structured DFA models fit to the application data suggest site-specific patterns in how biological and physical processes affect water quality variables. At the bay mouth location, physical processes …