Digital Commons Network^™

Title Changes And New Members, Malachi Boling

NASIG Newsletter

No abstract provided.

Economic Costs For Three Selected Water Quality Treatment Technologies, Dawoon Jeong, Debabrata Sahoo, Heather Nix, Sarah White

Forestry and Natural Resources

Maintaining water quality in surface waters, including ponds and irrigation reservoirs, is essential for safe water use and is challenging. Mitigating and reducing nutrient levels is critical for managing risks of harmful algal blooms for agricultural operations, municipal drinking water suppliers, stormwater managers, and other water resource professionals. This article presents economic information about three best management practices (BMPs) treatment technologies well-suited to improving water quality for agricultural operations and small pond owners.

Understanding The Role Of Data Science Applications In Soil And Water Health, Payton Davis, Debabrata Sahoo, Dara Park, Brook Russell

Forestry and Natural Resources

Data science is an emerging field that can be incorporated into many disciplines, including environmental science. Data science can provide valuable information from data, enhancing the understanding of systems and environments. This publication is intended to give an overview of the different aspects of data science and how data science can be leveraged into and applied to soil and water health.

3h) Module Readings, 7, Barry Stiefel

Barry Stiefel, Civic Heritage and the Power of Place

No abstract provided.

Syllabus, Gordon Mantler

Gordon Mantler, From Abolition to Home Rule: Writing D.C. Movement Histories

No abstract provided.

Syllabus: Civically Engaged Rhetoric In The Age Of Generative Ai, Kelly "Vee" Kennedy

Kelly “Vee” Kennedy, Design and Syllabus for Civically Engaged Rhetoric in the Age of Generative AI

No abstract provided.

Assignment 4: Final Project - The Creative Pitch, Stephanie Sertich

Stefanie Sertich, Introduction to Theatre: Building Community Through Performance and Arts Advocacy

No abstract provided.

2c) Module 2 Readings, 2, Barry Stiefel

Barry Stiefel, Civic Heritage and the Power of Place

No abstract provided.

Mechatronics: Fundamentals, Design, Integration, And Validation, Guoming Zhu

Mechatronics

This textbook is a product of Co-DREAM OER (Collaborative Development of Robotics, Mechatronics, and Advanced Manufacturing Open Educational Resources), an initiative funded by the U.S. Department of Education to develop open educational resource textbooks on robotics, mechatronics, and advanced manufacturing processes. The texts are written for students enrolled in 2-year associate’s, 4-year bachelor’s, and graduate-level courses. This specific text has been created by a team of scholars, students, support staff, and other professionals from across the country. It is intended for mechatronics courses for 4-year bachelor’s and graduate-level programs.

Future Meteorological Droughts In The Southeastern Us, Kunal Bhardwaj, C. Prakash Khedun, Abdul A. Khan

Journal of South Carolina Water Resources

The Southeastern U.S., despite its humid climate, experiences recurrent meteorological droughts which impact agricultural, water resources, ecological systems, and the economy and society. Knowledge of future drought conditions can guide adaptation efforts. Here, we evaluate historical and projected droughts using the Standardized Precipitation Index (SPI) and the Standardized Precipitation-Evapotranspiration Index (SPEI) computed from an ensemble of eight bias-corrected Global Climate Models (GCMs) from the Climate Model Intercomparison Phase-6 (CMIP6). The historical performance (1950–2014) of the GCM’s mean was benchmarked against gridded observations from the Climate Research Unit (CRU). Future changes were assessed under 1.5°C, 2.0°C, and 3.0°C global warming levels.We …

The Impact Of Mentoring: Professional Growth, Reflection, And Retention In Secondary Science Education, Summer M. Landreth

All Dissertations

Teacher attrition threatens the stability of the U.S. education system, with science teachers experiencing particularly high turnover rates. While research has primarily focused on early-career teachers, less is known about the factors influencing mid-career and veteran science teachers’ decisions to remain in or leave the profession. This study explored mentoring student teachers as a potentially transformative experience for cooperating teachers, offering opportunities for professional development, identity development, and enhanced retention. Guided by Mezirow’s Transformative Learning Theory, the study examined how mentoring may function as a productive experience that prompts critical reflection, revitalizes pedagogy, and reconnects teachers with their professional purpose. …

Evaluating The Responses Of Organic Corn Systems To Interseeded Cover Crops, Seeding Rate, And Tillage, Luvina B. Madrid

All Dissertations

Cover crop interseeding offers a potential strategy to increase plant diversity and make better use of above- and belowground resource niches within organic corn production systems. Interseeded cover crops can support agroecosystem sustainability through aboveground biomass production as well as belowground processes mediated by roots, including soil structural improvement, nutrient cycling, biological activity, and carbon storage. However, the success of interseeding depends on selecting cover crop species and management practices that provide these benefits without competing with the crop for water, nutrients, and light. Research studies were conducted to evaluate the effects of interseeded cover crop species, seeding rate, and …

Improving Collective Aggregation Strategies For Hpc And Ai Workloads, Mikaila J. Gossman

All Dissertations

Modern high-performance computing (HPC) and artificial intelligence (AI) workloads increasingly generate data at rates that outpace the storage systems responsible for persisting it. While computational throughput has scaled dramatically through parallel processors, GPUs, and specialized accelerators, storage systems have improved far more slowly. As such, application performance is increasingly limited by the ability to move data efficiently through deep, heterogeneous storage hierarchies rather than by raw computational capability. This dissertation investigates how aggregation and data movement strategies must be redesigned to close this gap, addressing four central challenges: resource contention between foreground computation and background I/O, the fine-grained and irregular …

The Price Of Possessiveness: How Parental Materialism Undermines Child Psychological Wellbeing, Miao Li

Sociology Publications

Materialism, a value system that places the pursuit of possessions at the core of happiness and life meaning, is a dominant cultural force in modern societies. While its associations with individual well-being are well-documented, its intergenerational implications remain understudied. This study conceptualizes materialism as a potential family stressor contributing to the intergenerational transmission of stress. An intergenerational crossover model of materialism was tested using data from 1,996 parent-child pairs in Zhengzhou, China. Results indicate that higher parental materialism is associated with stronger materialistic values in children, weaker family relationships, and more frequent parental comparisons, each of which is linked to …

Probabilistic Modeling Of Hurricane Hazards And Structural Reliability Of Offshore Wind Turbines Under Climate Change, Susmita Bhowmik

All Dissertations

Hurricanes are among the most destructive natural hazards in the United States, especially along the Atlantic and Gulf coasts. Climate change is expected to affect hurricane activity by changing important environmental conditions. At the same time, offshore wind energy is expanding, creating a need to understand hurricane risks to offshore wind turbines.

This dissertation develops a stochastic hurricane simulation framework to estimate hurricane wind hazards for coastal and offshore regions along the U.S. East Coast and Gulf Coast. The framework generates synthetic hurricane tracks using updated storm-frequency data and is validated against historical records from HURDAT2, NOAA buoy wind observations, …

Optimal Management Of Electric Vehicle Fast Charging Stations Via Lyapunov Optimization And Reinforcement Learning, Mohammad Hossein Abbasi

All Dissertations

The transportation sector is responsible for 28% of global energy-related emissions, with road transport accounting for most of these emissions. While electric vehicles (EVs) are essential for decarbonizing transportation, widespread adoption depends on fast, efficient charging. Fast charging reduces charging time but accelerates battery degradation, whereas slow charging increases range anxiety. In addition, fast charging stations (FCSs) impose significant stress on distribution grids, making their operation a critical challenge. Optimizing FCS operation can conflict with EV fast-charging objectives, yet existing research largely treats these problems independently despite their strong interdependence.

Current fast-charging methods focus on individual cells or small battery …

A Surface-Bound Detection Architecture For Label-Free Evanescent-Wave Sensing Of Cobalt In Complex Fluids, Jeremiah W. Carpenter

All Dissertations

Cobalt exposure is a clinical concern in orthopedic implant surveillance, where cobalt-chromium wear debris can release ions detectable in blood and urine, and an environmental concern in mining-affected and industrial water systems. Reference laboratory methods, including inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry, provide sensitive quantification but require centralized instrumentation, trained personnel, and controlled sample handling, which limits their availability for routine screening in decentralized clinical and environmental contexts. This dissertation develops a surface-bound detection architecture for label-free evanescent-wave sensing of cobalt in complex fluids. The architecture rests on a physical necessity argument grounded in interfacial optics: at physiologically and environmentally relevant …

Theory-Informed Generative Agents For Human Behavioral Modeling In Disasters, Liming Lu

All Dissertations

This dissertation develops a theory-informed generative-agent framework for modeling human behavioral decisions in disasters. Existing flood and disaster preparedness models often emphasize physical hazards, infrastructure exposure, or statistical correlations, but they struggle to capture the heterogeneous and evolving choices households make. This limitation is especially important for climate-related hazards, where future damage depends not only on changes in rainfall, inundation, and urban development, but also on decentralized protective actions such as house elevation, flood insurance, evacuation, and early preparedness. The dissertation integrates two empirical studies: a flood-risk study in Charleston, South Carolina, and a household disaster-preparedness study across hurricane contexts. …

Smart Process Planning For Automated Fiber Placement, Matthew J. Godbold

All Dissertations

Automated Fiber Placement (AFP) is a preeminent manufacturing technology for producing high-performance composite structures, offering precise material placement, reduced waste, and the potential for highly optimized lightweight designs. While AFP has been widely adopted in aerospace applications, its broader use across industries such as automotive, wind energy, maritime, and sporting goods remains limited. A key barrier to wider adoption is the traditional separation of design, manufacturing, and inspection processes, which drives up cost and results in inefficiencies, sub-optimal designs, and limited feedback between lifecycle stages. In current practice, manufacturing is treated as an isolated process, disconnected from early-stage design decisions …

Leveraging Deep Learning Recurrence And Attention Mechanisms For Flood Forecasting And Assessment, Elnaz Heidari

All Dissertations

Predicting how much water will flow in rivers and streams is important for managing floods, water supply, and the environment. Traditionally, government agencies have used complex models, such as the National Water Model (NWM), which simulate how much water moves through landscapes using physical laws and real-world data. However, recent advances in Artificial Intelligence (AI) have enabled new ways to make these predictions. This research explored whether AI-based models could predict river discharge more accurately. These AI models learn patterns from past data instead of relying only on physical rules. To find out how well they work, the AI models …

An Investigation Of The Use Of Self-Regulated Strategy Development With A Mnemonic On The Fraction Computation Performance Of Students At-Risk For Emotional/Behavioral Disorders, Melissa D. Hullett

All Dissertations

Interventions that help students organize their thinking can reduce cognitive load and support academic, behavioral, and social success. Self-Regulated Strategy Development (SRSD) is an evidence-based instructional framework that combines strategy instruction with self-regulation to promote student independence and improve student confidence. A mnemonic has been shown to help scaffold support across all content areas to the level of mastery required by Stage 4 of the SRSD framework ("Memorize It"). In mathematics, where executive functioning demands are high, interventions to scaffold content must provide the metacognitive support needed for a diverse student population. This study used a multiple-baseline design to examine …

Integrated Power, Energy, And Thermal Management For Autonomous Hybrid Off-Road Vehicles: Multi-Timescale Modeling, Predictive Control, And Resilient Thermal Design, Anirudh Sundar

All Dissertations

Electrification and autonomy are increasingly important for off-road vehicles operating in construction, agriculture, mining, defense, and other demanding environments. These platforms must deliver high tractive power under unstructured terrain, harsh ambient conditions, low-speed operation, and large auxiliary loads. While hybrid and electrified powertrains offer improved efficiency, mobility, and auxiliary power capability, they also introduce significant challenges in managing tightly coupled power, energy, and thermal subsystems. In particular, lithium-ion batteries, power electronics, electric machines, and internal combustion engine-generator systems operate across different temperature limits and timescales, requiring coordinated management to ensure efficiency, durability, and safe operation. This dissertation develops modeling, planning, …

Microstructural Shielding And Advanced Fatigue Crack Analysis In The Presence Of Deformation Twinning, Seyed Ali Asli

All Dissertations

Design methods to mitigate fatigue failures have remained relatively stagnant, as engineers have relied on existing continuum-level models and adhered to the damage tolerance design methodology. Although damage-tolerant design has led to increased safety, extended component in-service life, and better life predictions, it still relies on maintenance routines to identify dangerous cracks. This research aims to test the hypothesis that bundles of deformation twin boundaries will increase the resistance to fatigue crack growth (FCG). Slip and twinning are two dominant mechanisms of plastic deformation in metals. Slip is more common in materials with face-centered cubic (FCC) crystal structures at room …

Towards Scalable And Trustworthy Machine Learning For Future Ai Systems, Gen Li

All Dissertations

No abstract provided.

Investigating The Impacts Of Information Framing And Representation On Multi-Stakeholder Decision-Making For Tradespace Exploration, Meredith G. Sutton

All Dissertations

Tradespace exploration (TSE) is a decision-making process used in engineering design to search through a tradespace, containing all potential solutions to a design problem and their performance evaluations, in order to select optimal or near-optimal solutions. Solution optimality is driven by a desire to maximize the overall utility of a solution, which often cannot be done without making tradeoffs or compromises. The TSE process requires vast amounts of information which can be difficult to generate and understand, often leading to challenges including information overload, delays in decision-making, and suboptimal decisions, even for the most experienced designers. To address the challenges …

Bridging Models And Real-World Performance: Capturing Represented, Hidden, And Unrepresented Dynamics In Complex Systems, Dixizi Liu

All Dissertations

Complex systems often depend on adaptive performance that is difficult to capture using structured data or formal models alone. This dissertation asks how predictive modeling, coordination-cost measurement, and simulation can be integrated to better represent the visible, hidden, and unrepresented dynamics that shape real-world system performance.

Sterile Processing Departments (SPDs) provide the empirical context for this work because they support safe and timely surgical care while operating under high workload variability, time pressure, and tight coordination with operating rooms. Hospitals rely on SPDs to clean, assemble, sterilize, and deliver surgical instrument trays so surgeries can start on time and proceed …

Human-Centered Design Of Extended Reality For Learning Adoption, Effectiveness, And Collaborative Training Performance, Bhargav Upadhyay

All Dissertations

Extended reality (XR) technologies like virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) can be used for technical training to help students learn and practice complex tasks in a safe digital environment. Despite known benefits evidence is required to explore the effectiveness of these technologies to support student learning outcomes. Furthermore, technical training programs need evidence about when these tools improve learning, what are the barriers to adoption of these technologies, and how training should be designed by leveraging these technologies. This dissertation examined how XR technologies can support higher education and workforce training, specifically focusing on barriers and facilitators to …

Imaging Oxygen Near Implanted Medical Devices Through Tissue With X-Ray And Ultrasound Modulated Luminescence Chemical Imaging, Vigjna Abbaraju

All Dissertations

Oxygen plays a crucial role in stem cell maintenance, tissue regeneration, disease progression, and treatment efficacy. For example, understanding oxygen dynamics within implanted medical devices, such as bone scaffolds, is essential for successful tissue regeneration and can serve as an early indicator of infection. The existing oxygen sensing and imaging techniques are often limited by narrow imaging depth, low spatial resolution in vivo resulting in poor understanding of oxygen dynamics in tissue microenvironments. This dissertation describes the development of implantable sensors using X-ray scintillators and thermochromic leuco dye paired with phosphorescent oxygen dye (PtTFPP) to image oxygen using X-ray luminescent …

Essays On Gender Reforms, Education, And Child Marriage In India, Pratistha Adhikari

All Dissertations

This dissertation comprises three chapters that examine the effects of gender reforms on education and child marriage in India.

In Chapter 1, I estimate the causal effect of the Hindu Succession Act Amendment of 2005, which granted Hindu women equal inheritance rights to certain household assets, on their education. I use the National Family and Health Survey (NFHS-5) data from 2019–2021 and a difference-in- differences design that exploits variation across religions and women’s ages at the time of the reform. The reform increased the likelihood of completing Grade 12 by 7 percentage points for Hindu girls in rural areas. The …

From Gatekeeping To Opportunity: Authentic Assessment In Natural Resources Education, Aradaryn Marsh

All Dissertations

Assessment practices play a central role in shaping how students engage with learning, demonstrate understanding, and participate in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education. Despite increasing calls for more inclusive and professionally relevant educational practices, undergraduate STEM assessment remains heavily dominated by traditional examinations emphasizing memorization, speed, and standardized performance. These concerns may be particularly important within Natural Resources (NR) education, a field that requires students to integrate scientific knowledge with communication, collaboration, and applied problem-solving. This dissertation explores authentic assessment within undergraduate NR education through a multi-phase investigation examining assessment prevalence, student experiences, racially marginalized (RM) student perspectives, …