Digital Commons Network^™

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 …

Practical Multimodal Wearable Sensing For Functional Upper Extremity Primitive Classification With Application To Stroke Rehabilitation, Nicholas Weiss

Master's Theses

Stroke often causes long-term weakness and impaired motor control in the upper extremity (UE), making everyday tasks such as reaching, grasping, and moving objects more difficult. Restoring functional arm use is therefore a central goal of post-stroke rehabilitation. Measuring affected arm use continuously and objectively is important because isolated clinical assessments may not fully capture how the affected arm is used during therapy or daily life. Wearable sensors offer a promising approach for monitoring, but raw sensor signals are difficult to interpret directly. Functional movement primitives address this issue by describing UE behavior as smaller, task-agnostic movement units.

This thesis …

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 …

When Agents Spend Watts: Measuring Performance-Energy Trade-Offs In Agentic Ai Systems With Agenticbench, Logan J. Barker

Master's Theses

Agentic AI systems increasingly transform a single user request into a multi-step workflow of reasoning, tool use, retries, and framework coordination. Standard benchmark reporting emphasizes task accuracy, but this can hide the latency and energy-related cost of producing an answer. This thesis presents AgenticBench, a modular harness for evaluating agentic AI systems with task performance and execution-cost signals recorded together. AgenticBench integrates benchmark-owned scoring, framework adapters, deterministic task selection, energy profiling, SQLite persistence, and Pareto-style analysis. The main campaign evaluated an 84-cell matrix across four models, three agent frameworks, and six benchmarks on a Windows workstation with an NVIDIA RTX …

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 …

Challenges And Opportunities Of Mastery-Based Learning: A Student-Centered Analysis In An Upper Division Programming Languages Course, Parshana Sekhon

Master's Theses

Traditional grading structures in computer science courses reward performance on a few high-stakes assessments that may not accurately reflect a student’s mastery of concepts. Mastery-Based Learning (MBL) offers students multiple opportunities to demonstrate understanding through iterative feedback and reassessment, promoting their persistence and self-regulation. However, MBL can promote student behaviors like procrastination, “minimal effort” attempts, or de-prioritizing the course in favor of other courses with inflexible deadlines, which may undermine its effectiveness. This case study investigates how students navigated MBL in an upper-division computer science course at Cal Poly in San Luis Obispo. The course explores the fundamentals of programming …

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 …

Uncertainty-Weighted Fusion Of Sensor And Monocular Foundation-Model Depth For 3d Gaussian Splatting In Indoor Rgb-D Capture, Brandon S. Howell

Master's Theses

Depth-supervised 3D Gaussian Splatting can improve scene geometry in indoor RGB-D capture, but noisy commodity depth measurements can also reduce rendered image quality. This thesis studies that trade-off in room-scale indoor reconstruction using two complementary depth sources: Kinect-class RGB-D sensor depth, which is metric but noisy and incomplete, and Depth Anything 3 (DA3) monocular depth, which is dense and meter-valued but not calibrated to the sensor or laser-reference geometry. 

The proposed method constructs a per-pixel depth supervision target by inverse-variance fusion of the sensor depth and the monocular depth prediction. The fused target is used to train a depth-supervised 3D …

Design And Development Of A Resonance Ignition System Using Gaseous Propellants, Benjamin J. Hoefer

Master's Theses

This work presents the development and experimental evaluation of a resonance igniter (RI) operating with premixed gaseous propellants. Resonance ignition is a non-electrical ignition concept in which an underexpanded jet impinges on a closed-end Hartmann–Sprenger tube (HST), generating cyclic compression and expansion waves that rapidly heat gas near the tube endwall. A modular experimental system was designed and built to investigate resonance ignition using methane–air and methane–oxygen mixtures. The system includes a supplemental configuration that may probe for mixture conditions favorable to ignition, informing RI testing. Pressure and temperature measurements were used to characterize pressure control, mixture pressure ratio (MPR), …

Analysis And Design Of A 2-Bit Millimeter-Wave Reconfigurable Intelligent Surface And Investigation Of Fss-Assisted Angular Stability, Max Spalek

Master's Theses

Millimeter-Wave (mm-wave) technology utilizes high frequency spectrum and can deliver multi-gigabit speeds, ultra-low latency, and massive bandwidth capacity. However, this technology is rather new and many technical challenges remain. On the other hand, Reconfigurable Intelligent Surfaces (RIS) have emerged as promising structures for controllable electromagnetic wavefront manipulation in wireless communication systems. This thesis presents the design of a 2-bit RIS unit-cell element operating throughout the 30–34 GHz mm-wave band, where the structure was progressively refined from an initial resonating geometry toward a grounded reflective RIS configuration. The proposed structure utilizes PIN-diode switching states to produce four discrete reflected phase states …

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 …

Characteristic Stress And Strain Optimization Of Cardiovascular Catheters With Laser-Cut Hypotubes Using Finite Element Analysis, Kyle E. Hirth

Master's Theses

Cardiovascular catheter systems rely on laser-cut hypotubes to balance flexibility and structural integrity required for minimally invasive surgical procedures.  Optimizing these mechanical characteristics remains a significant challenge.  This study aims to investigate the influence of key laser-cut geometric parameters on the mechanical performance of hypotubes through finite element analysis.

Commercially representative laser-cut hypotubes were modeled and a finite element model was developed.   Geometric design parameters were varied across a design space consisting of pitch values ranging from 0.006 in. to 0.018 in. and cuts per revolution (CPR) ranging from 2.5 – 4.5.  For each pitch and CPR combination, loading stiffness …

Aerodynamic Design And Structural Evaluation Of A Global Minimum Torque Inspired Multirotor Propeller, Zeke Bukovansky

Master's Theses

This thesis develops a repeatable design, CAD, aerodynamic postprocessing, structural screening, and manufacturing feasibility workflow for a 22-inch global minimum torque inspired multirotor propeller. Matched MIL and GMT geometries were compared at a 35 N, 4000 rpm static-hover operating condition using BEMT/XFOIL aerodynamic postprocessing, with diameter, blade count, chord distribution, airfoil schedule, and target thrust held constant. The final modeled comparison predicted a modest 1.5% reduction in torque and shaft power for the GMT case while maintaining the same thrust target. CAD construction, MATLAB reduced-order beam model, Abaqus screening, and manufacturing planning were used to identify geometry level structural and …

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 …

A2s Uplink Latency Minimization For Wildfire Monitoring Systems Using Mbse And Stochastic Modeling, Luis Giovanni Wang

Master's Theses

Wildfire response depends on how quickly a detection reaches the people who act on it, and the slowest remaining step is often the link that carries an alert from a remote sensing platform to a satellite. This thesis models the latency of that link, the Air-to-Space uplink, for a wildfire-monitoring UAV that carries a Starlink terminal and sends an ALERT packet to a serving Low Earth Orbit satellite. The uplink is difficult to predict because both the UAV and the satellite move, and because the wildfire environment degrades the channel at the moment the data matters most.

The thesis uses …

A Proof-Of-Concept Design Of A High-Gain Deployable Reflectarray Antenna For A 3u Cubesat, Armin Behbahani

Master's Theses

CubeSats are a class of nanosatellites that have democratized space exploration by greatly reducing cost and complexity. Their small size and limited power generation directly limit the performance of a high-data-rate communication system due to low transmit power and limited gain from small antenna sizes. Transmission losses increase with higher operating frequencies, spurring the need for innovative high-gain antenna solutions. This thesis investigates the design of a deployable 10 GHz reflectorarray, a planar high-gain aperture antenna, for a 3U CubeSat. A simple variable-size square-patch resonant unit cell was designed for implementation on commonly available PCB layer stack-ups. Preliminary reflectarray system …

Construction Of Lightly Reinforced Concrete Walls And Foundations For Fiber Reinforced Polymer Testing, Aidan D. Seed, Coulter Langmaid, Ryan R. Bousfield, Bennett B. Steiger

Construction Management

This paper details the construction of two cast-in-place concrete walls with attached footings, built to continue ongoing research into Fiber Reinforced Polymer (FRP) retrofitting conducted by California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo, Architectural Engineering (ARCE) department. The project was located inside the College of Architecture and Environmental Design (CAED) High Bay testing facility and is part of a multi-year effort to evaluate FRP wrap as a seismic retrofitting option for lightly reinforced concrete walls dating to the pre-1980s. Formwork from the previous year's senior project was reused for this effort, and a two-phase pour was utilized and executed by …

Feminist Consciousness-Raising Groups In The Classroom, Andrea Quaid

Feminist Pedagogy

Feminist consciousness-raising (FCR) groups in the classroom are a way to facilitate conversation, enliven course content and activate a feminist practice to support student learning. Different from small group activities structured by an instructor’s prompt, FCR groups are a practice and pedagogy that help students identify “what really matters” (hooks, Teaching Critical Thinking). For example, rather than a teacher’s instruction (“please find three main points in the text to share with the full class”), students create their own prompts and facilitate their own conversations. Student agency is activated as they build conversations with one another and develop meaningful interpersonal skills …

Academic Senate - Minutes, 05/26/2026, Academic Senate

Academic Senate Minutes

No abstract provided.

As-1014-26 Resolution On Ufpp 12.2 Number Of Office Hours, Academic Senate Faculty Affairs Committee

Academic Senate Resolutions

Resolves that UFPP 12.2 be revised effective Fall 2026 according to the attached documents; and further resolves that colleges and departments update their office hours policies to conform with the revisions to UFPP 12.2; and be it further that, when published on the Academic Programs and Planning website, the scaling of the office hours to instructional workload shall be translated into both minutes and credit hours; and further resolves that Cal Poly prioritize the development of a directory of faculty office hours accessible within the portal.

Academic Senate - Agenda, 05/26/2026, Academic Senate

Academic Senate Agendas

No abstract provided.

As-1013-26 Resolution On Revised Academic Assessment Council Membership, Academic Assessment Council

Academic Senate Resolutions

Resolves that the Academic Senate of Cal Poly endorses the attached proposal to adjust the membership of the Academic Assessment Council; and further resolves that this revised AAC membership be put into effect beginning with the 2026-27 academic year.

As 1012-26 Resolution To Establish Cal Poly’S Principles Of Community, Academic Senate Diversity Committee

Academic Senate Resolutions

Resolves that Cal Poly adopt these Principles of Community as shown on the attached copy; and be it further that the Academic Senate of the California Polytechnic State University urge its San Luis Obispo and Solano campus stakeholders to publicize and promote these Principles of Community across its campuses, including but not limited to: Administration (1), Maritime Faculty Offices (3), Performing Arts Center (6), Health Center (27), University Housing (31), Maritime Library (5)/Kennedy Library (35), Maritime University Police Department (50)/University Police (36), Maritime Dining Center (40), Recreation Center (43), Maritime Management (48), and Maritime Student Services Building (16)/Student Services (124); …