Digital Commons Network^™

Mental Health In Prisons: Examining Variations In Disorders Across Custody Levels, Ariel Bysiek

Dissertations and Theses

The United States has a significantly large prison population with the number of people currently in a correctional facility being 1.9 million. Concern has been increasingly growing related to treatment of individuals in prison, particularly when it comes to solitary confinement. Many people believe that solitary confinement is unnecessarily cruel and debilitating to AIC's mental health. Studies have found contradicting information as to whether solitary impacts mental health. Part of the reason for this contradiction stems from the lack of measurement systems that are appropriate for AICs. The measures used in studies are meant for the general population, not individuals …

Dwelling, Kelly Erin Mclysaght

Dissertations and Theses

dwelling explores the network of connections between time, the self, and physical space. People and place are layered, and memories haunt these blurred spaces. Poems follow several lines of questioning: what lingering presence does abuse leave in the body and in the home? Is it possible to inhabit and share space with these presences, and if so, what does that mean for identity, relationships, and safety? Through repetition, image, and syntax, dwelling constructs a maze, enacting the conflicting desire to both linger in memory and run from it, holding the haunting beauty of grief and loss alongside anger and alienation.

Fostering Meaningful Learning: Experiences Of Linguistically Diverse Trainers In Early Childhood Care And Education (Ecce) Professional Development, Anna Howell

Dissertations and Theses

Linguistically diverse trainers play a critical role in reshaping professional development (PD) within Early Childhood Care and Education (ECCE), yet their contributions remain marginalized within English-dominant institutional structures. This qualitative study explored how these trainers define and deliver meaningful learning experiences despite systemic barriers, limited resources, and monolingual policies. Grounded in critical constructivism, the research centered the lived experiences and voices of linguistically diverse trainers across multiple contexts. Through semi-structured interviews, participants shared how they co-constructed relational, culturally grounded, and linguistically affirming PD environments rooted in community knowledge and emotional connection. Findings reveal that meaningful learning occurs when training reflects …

Coli@Fire2024: Findings Of Word-Level Code-Mixed Language Identification In Dravidian Languages, Asha Hegde, Fazlourrahman Balouchzahi, Sabur Butt, Sharal Coelho, Kavya G, Harshitha S. Kumar, Sonith D, Shashirekha H. L., Ameeta Agrawal

Computer Science Faculty Publications and Presentations

Code-mixing, a linguistic phenomenon where multiple languages are blended within a single text, has become increasingly prevalent in multilingual societies, particularly in digital communication. The CoLI-Dravidian shared task, organized as part of Forum for Information Retrieval and Evaluation (FIRE) 2024, aimed to address these challenges by inviting researchers to develop models capable of classifying words in code-mixed texts involving Dravidian languages — Tamil, Kannada, Malayalam, and Tulu - interwoven with English. The task presents significant challenges due to the complexity of linguistic structures, mixed-language tokens, and dialectal variations, especially in low-resource languages like those in the Dravidian family. The participating …

Discourse Analysis Of Partner-Focus In Intimate Partner Violence, Maureen Theresa Lowell

Dissertations and Theses

Intimate partner violence (IPV) involves behaviors that harm or threaten to harm an intimate partner; but more importantly, it involves the production of power and control in an intimate relationship that threatens a partner's liberty and wellbeing. As a wicked problem, IPV is challenging to unpack without reducing the complexities that give it its power. This study seeks to explore the complex nature of how abusive men's focus on their partner functions as a mechanism of abuse. To develop the concept of other-focus I draw on constructs of coercive control, power, and dominance. To investigate partner-focus, I conducted a discourse …

The Evolving Future Of Work: Implications For Newcomer Adaptability And Connectivity During Organizational Socialization, Talya N. Bauer, Berrin Erdogan, Allison M. Ellis, Donald M. Truxillo, Grant M. Brady, Julie M. Mccarthy

Business Faculty Publications and Presentations

Organizational socialization and the practice of onboarding new hires are central human resources functions. However, traditional socialization theory and practice were built on assumptions that are increasingly misaligned with today's work context. We identified four current, emerging, and future work trends that characterize the evolving landscape surrounding organizational socialization: technological advancement, the expansion of remote work arrangements, rising societal loneliness and mental health challenges, and aging workforce demographics. Collectively, these trends have contributed to dramatic shifts in the context and performance of work, as well as the expectations that employees and organizations hold for one another. Accordingly, we argue that …

Alignment Of Perceptual Similarity Metrics With Human Perception, Abhijay Ghildyal

Dissertations and Theses

Perceptual similarity metrics are used for quantitatively evaluating the similarity between two images as it would appear to human perception. These metrics aim to mimic the human visual system, providing a more accurate assessment of visual similarity. Such visual assessments are considered to be more advanced than simple pixel-wise comparisons such as ℓ_p norm distances. Thus, a human-like assessment of visual similarity, makes the metrics valuable for applications in image compression, restoration, and enhancement, where evaluating perceptual quality is crucial. Perceptual similarity metrics have progressively become more correlated with human judgments on perceptual similarity; however, despite recent advances, the …

Responding To The Needs Of Dementia Care Partners: Recommendations For Policy Change At The State And Federal Levels., Walter D. Dawson, Jenn Reed, Allison Lindauer, Sherril B. Gelmon

Institute on Aging Publications

The need to optimize supports of Alzheimer's disease and related dementias (ADRD) care partners through policy innovation is high. This study sought to frame the care and support needs of multiple historically underrepresented populations who may be underserved and/or have difficulty accessing culturally specific services and determine specific policies that may reduce ADRD care partner burden and improve wellbeing. Qualitative data were gathered through interviews ( = 24) with leaders of organizations that support people living with ADRD and focus groups ( = 5) with dementia care partners from four communities historically underserved in the United States (Asian, Black, Indigenous, …

Critical Mineral Mining And Native American Rights, Spencer Beeman Janes

Dissertations and Theses

This thesis examines the intersection between critical mineral mining and Native Americans' rights. Critical minerals are essential for creating electric and sustainable energy sources that fuel the world's evolving technological landscape. The United States is making a concerted effort to mine these minerals on American soil due to their vital role in serving the U.S economy and national defense. However, many of these mineral reserves lie within close proximity to Native American reservations, and mining them directly impacts Native American communities. The development of critical mineral mines can offer substantial benefits to indigenous communities, but they also have the capacity …

The Art Of Memory: The Medieval Peutinger Map, Amber Shrewsbury

Dissertations and Theses

The Peutinger map is an enigma: a twelfth-century map of the Roman Empire, it is secular and oddly shaped, its dimensions distorted to show Rome at the center of the world. Its creator, purpose, and provenance currently remain lost to history. Long considered by classicists to be a copy of a lost Roman original, the map has not been seriously examined by medievalists, possibly because it does not adhere to the Christian "T-O" style of medieval mappaemundi.

While other scholars have focused on what the Peutinger map reflects about ancient Rome, I have chosen to explore how the Peutinger …

Beyond Translating Cultures: Organizational Cultural Brokering And Latin@/E/X Community Resilience After The "Mobile Home Parks" Fire, Christine Atalie Da Rosa

Dissertations and Theses

As wildfires increase in frequency and severity in rural communities, disaster management agencies are seeking to collaborate with community-based organizations (CBOs) working with rural, low-income Latin@/e/x communities to build wildfire resilience. This qualitative case study examines the critical role of CBOs rooted in their local, predominately low-income Latin@/e/x communities as cultural brokers in supporting Latin@/e/x wildfire survivors following the 2020 "Mobile Home Parks" Fire in a rural county in Oregon. Drawing from 23 semi-structured interviews, three focus groups, a review of relevant documents, and participant observations, the research investigates how Latin@/e/x CBOs navigated the complex cultural landscape between wildfire survivors …

Stimulated Cytokine Production, Attachment, And Emotional Well-Being In Dementia Spousal Caregivers, Daniel L. Argueta, Sarah Roberts, Kelly N. Brice, E Lydia Wu-Chung, Vincent D. Lai, Jensine Paoletti-Hatcher, Bryan T. Denny, Charles Green, Samantha Henry, Multiple Additional Authors

Psychology Faculty Publications and Presentations

Proinflammatory cytokine production may be related to poor emotional adjustment in dementia spousal caregivers. People who display attachment insecurity may be at increased risk for adverse caregiving experiences and poor psychosocial outcomes.

An Example Where Taking An Additional Observation Doesn't Help, Stephen Portnoy, James Stein

Mathematics and Statistics Faculty Publications and Presentations

It seems intuitively obvious that no part of a random sample should be discarded. However, for most students, the first formal justification of this idea is when sufficiency is introduced in an introductory statistical theory course. Students are often left with the idea that conditioning on the sufficient statistic always improves inference, even though the formal theory only says that for any statistical procedure there is one depending on the sufficient statistic that is no worse. Here we present an example on comparing two coins based on two consecutive tosses, where the optimal probability of guessing which coin has the …

The People's Rivers: Early Environmental Regulation And The Oregon State Sanitary Authority, Avery Morgan Fischer

Dissertations and Theses

The environmental movement in Oregon can trace its origins to the turn of the twentieth century, where citizen activism and initiative led to the creation of an early environmental regulatory agency, the Oregon State Sanitary Authority. This creation established that the State of Oregon had a duty to preserve, not just the navigability or usability of rivers and waterways, but the quality and purity of its water. The Oregon State Sanitary Authority played an active role in maintaining and protecting the environment as a mandate of the people, and throughout its thirty-year existence battling industrial polluters, reluctant municipalities, and disinterested …

Isolation Enhancement Based On Tm010 And Te30 Mode Characteristics In A Patch Antennas Using Genetic Algorithm Optimization For Ku-Band Applications, Muddineni Raveendra, U. Saravanakumar, P. Padmaloshani, P. Saam Prasanth Dheeraj, Anand Anbalagan, R. Sreelakshmy

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Publications and Presentations

This paper proposes a novel technique to enhance isolation in rectangular patch antennas by leveraging the mode characteristics of TM010 and TE30 to achieve better than −40 dB between the transmitter and receiver with dual‐polarization features. The primary innovation of this work lies in achieving significant isolation enhancement solely by combining two resonant modes with orthogonal polarizations, without incorporating any additional design elements such as parasitic components or decoupling structures. To validate the isolation enhancement based on these mode characteristics, a pair of rectangular transmitter and receiver patch antennas was designed to operate in the frequency range from 14 to …

Subspace And Auxiliary Space Preconditioners For High-Order Interior Penalty Discretizations In H(Div), Will Pazner

Mathematics and Statistics Faculty Publications and Presentations

In this paper, we construct and analyze preconditioners for the interior penalty discontinuous Galerkin discretization posed in the space H(div). These discretizations are used as one component in exactly divergence-free pressure-robust discretizations for the Stokes problem. Three preconditioners are presently considered: a subspace correction preconditioner using vertex patches and the lowest-order H1-conforming space as a coarse space, a fictitious space preconditioner using the degree-p discontinuous Galerkin space, and an auxiliary space preconditioner using the degree-(p − 1) discontinuous Galerkin space and a block Jacobi smoother. On certain classes of meshes, the subspace and fictitious space preconditioners result in provably well-conditioned …

Prospects For Telemedicine Adoption: Prognostic Modeling As Exemplified By Rural Areas Of Usa, Jisun Kim, Hamad Alanazi, Tugrul Daim

Engineering and Technology Management Faculty Publications and Presentations

Experts predict that in the majority of countries state healthcare expenditures will continue to rise. Usage of telemedicine applications – the use of information and communications technologies (ICT) in order to provide clinical health care at a distance – will help optimize the costs of healthcare in the long-term. The main advantages of telemedicine include reducing the number of doctor’s errors, saving both patients and physicians time, and improving the efficiency of healthcare organizations. It also ensures timely and quality services for large segments of the population living in remote territories with difficult socio-economic conditions, particularly rural areas.The paper forecasts …

Occurrence Of Pesticides In Oregon Coastal Waters And Effects On The Intertidal Sea Anemone, Anthopleura Elegantissima, Gabriella Mae Bleil

Dissertations and Theses

Pesticides are used globally for a wide range of applications including agricultural, forestry, roadsides, freshwater systems, and personal use. While pesticides have ensured efficient crop production, they are frequently transported away from application sites and are ubiquitous in terrestrial and aquatic environments. Pesticides are often detected in watersheds and rivers globally, which can have unintentional toxic effects on non-target organisms by interfering with cellular processes, behavior, feeding, reproduction, and disrupting endocrine processes. The aggregating anemone, Anthopleura elegantissima, is an important species along the North American Pacific coast due to its symbiotic relationships that contribute to high productivity, and its …

The Lewis Basicity Of Amines On The Legault Iodonium Lewis Acidity Scale., Soocheta Jha, Souradeep Basu, Madison Bob, David R. Stuart

Chemistry Faculty Publications and Presentations

Diaryliodonium-amine complexes are proposed as key intermediates in metal-free C-N coupling reactions. Herein, H NMR titration is used to quantify association constants () between diaryliodonium triflates and synthetically relevant amines from which the amine Lewis basicity (LB) parameter is calculated. Compared to anionic Lewis bases, distinct solvent effects are observed.

Building Belonging Infrastructure In Cities: Arts/Culture-Based Critical Participatory Action Research And Youth, Kimberly Rae Nightingale

Dissertations and Theses

Belonging is a critical human need. Urban planning's history of bureaucratic expertise continues to champion the powerful, resulting in structures and procedures that still separate and damage city communities. This research challenges the current hegemony of urban planning that centers geography--the container of land--in its practice. Instead, centering the belonging of people to each other is the essential quality of healthy urban planning. A people-centered urban planning practice where the community's people are the experts and decision-makers of their own cities--and belonging is the primary objective--is long overdue.

Arts/culture-based critical participatory action research (PAR)--where the research questions, design, data collection, …

Sustainability Of Recycling Perovskite Solar Cells: Economic And Environmental Perspectives, Juan P. Herrera Meza

Dissertations and Theses

Perovskite solar cells (PSCs) are among the most promising next-generation photovoltaic technologies due to their high efficiency and low production costs. Nonetheless, concerns about the toxicity of lead-based absorbers and the lack of standardized recycling protocols present substantial environmental and economic challenges. This thesis provides a comparative life-cycle environmental and economic evaluation of eight state-of-the-art PSC recycling processes. This assessment adheres to ISO 14040/44 standards and combines environmental and cost analyses. Solvent reuse is explicitly modeled for recovery of each functional layer (back contact, absorber, hole-transport, and TCO/glass) to reflect industrial practices. The results show that while most methods reduce …

Summer Proceedings 2025, Sav Milburn, Brandon Hernandez-Calvario, Roberto Palacios, Paris Wu, Naomi Cai, Olivia Wang

altREU Projects

This comprehensive collection showcases cutting-edge research from undergraduate students participating in three innovative programs at Portland State University: the NSF-funded Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) site on "Computational Modeling Serving Portland," the alternative Research Experiences for Undergraduates (altREU) program, and Teuscher Lab internships. These programs leverage community partnerships while breaking traditional barriers through fully online, accessible formats that welcome students regardless of background or circumstances. The 24 projects span foundational AI methods, healthcare and medical AI, transportation and urban safety, environmental and earth sciences, language and social AI, and specialized neural architectures. From developing assistive driving companions and emotion-aware AI …

Direct Coupling Of Continuum And Shell Elements In Large Deformation Problems, Astrid Pechstein, Michael Neunteufel

Mathematics and Statistics Faculty Publications and Presentations

In many applications, thin shell-like structures are integrated within or attached to volumetric bodies. This includes reinforcements placed in soft matrix material in lightweight structure design, or hollow structures that are partially or completely filled. Finite element simulations of such setups are highly challenging. A brute force discretization of structural as well as volumetric parts using well-shaped three-dimensional elements may be accurate, but leads to problems of enormous computational complexity even for simple models. One desired alternative is the use of shell elements for thin-walled parts, as such a discretization greatly alleviates size restrictions on the underlying finite element mesh. …

Examining Equitable Participation With K-12 Teacher Leaders, Eva Thanheiser, Kathryn Elizabeth Roman, Ruth Heaton

Mathematics and Statistics Faculty Publications and Presentations

Many organizations and researchers in mathematics education call for antibias practices, but addressing hidden biases remains challenging. Equity QUantified In Participation (EQUIP), a quantitative tool designed to analyze classroom participation patterns by social markers, helps teachers identify these subtle inequities. This paper describes a professional development (PD) intervention introducing EQUIP to five teacher leaders (TLs) and three coaches in a predominantly Latine district, focusing on setting up EQUIP to identify and address participation inequities in their classrooms. The TLs implemented EQUIP in their classroom and gathered participation data twice. Findings revealed that TLs took up EQUIP in different ways and …

Expanding And Mainstreaming Sociohydrology Toward Transdisciplinary Praxis, Shinichiro Nakamura, Heidi Kreibich, Melissa Haeffner, Jenia Mukherjee, Giuliano Di Baldassarre, Maiko Sakamoto, Mikiko Sugiura, Günter Blöschl, Taikan Oki, Murugesu Sivapalan

Environmental Science and Management Faculty Publications and Presentations

Since its development in the early 2010s, sociohydrology has deepened our understanding of the long-term coevolution of humans and water by integrating insights from both the natural and social sciences, while also fostering an interdisciplinary community. Its modus operandi to date has been to focus on emergent phenomena, manifesting as unintended consequences, in a variety of contexts. The compound disaster that struck Japan’s Noto Peninsula in 2024, and similar experiences in other parts of the world, underscore the urgent need for systemic approaches that are co-developed by academia and practitioners and focus on context-specific solutions. This perspective piece thus calls …

Home Visitor Well-Being In Oregon: Influences On Stress, Mental Health And Risk For Staff Turnover Oregon’S 2023 Home Visiting Workforce Survey, Beth L. Green, Yumi Lee, Nicole Lauzus, Ron Joseph, Erin Gaines

Regional Research Institute for Human Services

This learning brief is the fourth in a series to share findings from a 2023 statewide survey of over 700 members of Oregon’s home visiting workforce. In this brief, we share information about home visitors’ well-being across several dimensions, including 1) job-related well-being (job satisfaction, feelings of emotional/physical safety on the job, work-related stress, and job burnout); 2) personal well-being (financial strain, depression and anxiety); and 3) risk of staff turnover.

Second, we explore whether there are differences in these aspects of well-being for home visitors who have different backgrounds and life experiences. We then ask the question, “What things …

The Answer To Perimenstrual Distress Is Not Automatically Prescription: Review Of Allopathic And Integrative Approaches To Mental Health Care For Pms & Pmdd Symptoms, Grace Oja

University Honors Theses

Premenstrual syndrome (PMS) and premenstrual dysphoric disorder (PMDD) affect a notable percentage of people who menstruate. PMS/PMDD have a wide range of symptoms that negatively impact mental well-being and quality of life. This review is the culmination of a database search to review current allopathic treatments for PMS/PMDD, which often include oral contraceptives and antidepressants, and explore evidence-based methods for integrative and alternative treatments to address some of the limitations of standard allopathic care, including limitations on which symptoms they address and side effects. This paper aims to examine how integrative medicine may expand existing treatments for PMS and PMDD …

The Discontinuous Petrov–Galerkin Method, Leszek Demkowicz, Jay Gopalakrishnan

Mathematics and Statistics Faculty Publications and Presentations

The discontinuous Petrov–Galerkin (DPG) method is a Petrov–Galerkin finite element method with test functions designed for obtaining stability. These test functions are computable locally, element by element, and are motivated by optimal test functions which attain the supremum in an inf-sup condition. A profound consequence of the use of nearly optimal test functions is that the DPG method can inherit the stability of the (undiscretized) variational formulation, be it coercive or not. This paper combines a presentation of the fundamentals of the DPG ideas with a review of the ongoing research on theory and applications of the DPG methodology. The …

Who Bears The Burden? An Assessment Of Vulnerability And Resilience To Consecutive Disasters In The Portland Metro Region, Idowu Ajibade, Jason Sauer, Matthew Walter, James M. Done, Ming Ge, Elliot Gall, Aswatha Raghunathasami, Paul C. Loikith, Chris Lower, Heejun Chang, Arun Pallathadka, E Mae Sowards

Geography Faculty Publications and Presentations

Climate-related disasters threaten urban areas worldwide, yet gaps remain in understanding how multiple stressors interact to shape resilience. This study examines exposure, vulnerability, and resilience across three consecutive extreme events in the Portland metro area: the September 2020 wildfire-related air pollution, the February 2021 snowstorm, and the June 2021 heatwave. We used geographically weighted regression and Spearman rank correlation analysis to investigate relationships between hazard impacts, the social vulnerability index (SoVI), Baseline Resilience Indicators for Communities (BRIC), and proximity to community-based organizations (CBOs) in 416 census tracts. Our analysis reveals strong spatial correlations between wildfire-related air pollution, winter storm impacts, …

Robust Contraction Decomposition For Minor-Free Graphs And Its Applications, Bandyapadhyay Sayan, William Lochet, Daniel Lokshtanov, Dániel Marx, Pranabendu Misra, Multiple Additional Authors

Computer Science Faculty Publications and Presentations

We prove a robust contraction decomposition theorem for H-minor-free graphs, which states that given an H-minor-free graph G and an integer p, one can partition in polynomial time the vertices of G into p sets Z₁,… ,Z_p such that tw(G/(Z_i ⧵ Z')) = O(p + |Z'|) for all i ∈ [p] and Z' ⊆ Z_i. Here, tw(⋅) denotes the treewidth of a graph and G/(Z_i ⧵ Z') denotes the graph obtained from G by contracting all edges with both endpoints in Z_i ⧵ Z'. Our result generalizes earlier results by Klein [SICOMP 2008] and Demaine et al. [STOC 2011] based …