Digital Commons Network^™

2025 North Haverhill Fair 4-H Animal Packet, Extension

UNH Cooperative Extension

No abstract provided.

Two Nursing Students Take Home Awards At Regional Conference, Keith Testa

UNH Today Archive

No abstract provided.

2025 North Haverhill Fair 4-H Exhibit Hall Packet, Extension

UNH Cooperative Extension

No abstract provided.

Leading Like Jesus In Organizations: Assessing The Practices Of Servant Leadership, Keenan A. Siegal

M.S. in Leadership

This project explores the concept of servant leadership through examining biblical accounts of Jesus Christ’s life and teachings. This project highlights how Jesus exemplified key principles of servant leadership, including humility, empathy, self-sacrifice, and a deep commitment to serving others before himself. The project contrasts Jesus’ leadership style with modern leadership models and discusses its relevance in today’s professional settings. Overall, it aims to explore a transformational approach to leadership in which it that prioritizes compassion, integrity, and the empowerment of others over meeting the needs of the business or serving yourself as a leader.

Strategic Planning: An Analysis Of Its Place And Purpose In Public Service, Scott J. Tice

M.S. in Leadership

This project identifies what strategic planning is, the benefits of planning, how to develop a strategic plan, what to include in the plan, and how to implement a strategic plan. The subject of this project was chosen to learn how to develop a strategic plan for an organization. The Hudson Fire Department has never had a strategic plan, and the Department believed they would benefit from having one. Many organizations hire consultants to develop their plans. The Department does not have money in the budget for this, and the Department believes they can develop a plan on their own. This …

Weekend Of Commencement Festivities Celebrates 2025 Graduates, Keith Testa

UNH Today Archive

No abstract provided.

Shoals Marine Laboratory Offers Mom A Memorable Island Garden Adventure, Robbin Ray

Media Relations

No abstract provided.

Diliang Chen Wins 2025 Innovator Of The Year Award For Work In Wearable Technology, Allison Bell

UNH Today Archive

No abstract provided.

Leading First-Generation College Students To Career Success: An Analysis Of Practices And Programs, Karyn E. King Fargo

M.S. in Leadership

The purpose of this study was to explore the experiences of first-generation college students and examine how career development programs impact their career readiness and success. Despite their growing presence in higher education, support systems for first-generation college students remain insufficient, putting many at risk of not completing their degree or successfully transitioning into the workforce. The study used a qualitative methodology consisting of a comprehensive literature review and interviews with college administrators involved in career and student development programs. The study compared insights from existing literature with the perspectives of college administrators, identifying key programs and practices that contribute …

Unh Faculty Senate Motion # Xxx-M1 Motion To Endorse The Shared “Statement In Support Of The Core Mission And Values Of Higher Education” With Preamble, Faculty Senate

Faculty Senate Motions

No abstract provided.

Former Chief Economist Of Dept. Of Labor Delivers Hogan Lecture At Paul College, Aaron Sanborn

UNH Today Archive

No abstract provided.

Managing Change In Higher Education: Implementing Mobile Credentials Across Usnh, Amy R. Gray

M.S. in Leadership

As higher education institutions continue to embrace digital transformation, mobile credentials are emerging as an innovative solution for modernizing campus ID systems. Literature suggests that these digital versions of campus ID cards, stored on smartphones, offer enhanced security, operational efficiency, and a more seamless campus experience. This research project explored best practices and key factors necessary for implementing mobile credentials across the University System of New Hampshire (USNH), with a focus on leadership’s role in managing change. Using a mixed-methods approach—including case study analysis, a literature review, and survey research—this study examined best practices, challenges, and strategies for successful adoption. …

History And Constitutional Interpretation: What’S Really “There”?, Thomas C. Galligan Jr.

The University of New Hampshire Law Review

In recent years, under the moniker originalism, the United States Supreme Court has relied heavily upon history to delineate the scope and contour of various constitutional rights.[1] The Court’s justification for that approach is that defining the meaning of the Constitution according to its original or historical meaning limits a judge from engaging in unbridled discretion when deciding a case. The Court’s focus on history continued in its 2023 term. Justice Breyer has called the history-heavy analytical approach a “rigid history-only approach.”

For a number of reasons, the history-only approach is flawed and does not, in fact, limit judicial …

Masthead, Unh Law Review Editorial Board

The University of New Hampshire Law Review

No abstract provided.

Layered Alignment, Spencer Williams

The University of New Hampshire Law Review

Most artificial intelligence (ai) researchers now believe that ai represents an existential threat to humanity. The most dangerous threat posed by ai is an issue known as the alignment problem: the risk that a sufficiently intelligent and capable ai system could become misaligned with the goals and values of its human creators and instead pursue its own objectives to the detriment of humanity, including the possibility of extinction. The tension at the heart of the alignment problem is familiar to scholars of agency, contracts, and corporate law, though it goes by a different name: the principal-agent problem. In the traditional …

Exploring The Dynamics Of Vibrio Parahaemolyticus Diversity In Developing Aquaculture Oyster Microbiomes, Benjamin John Wasson

Master's Theses and Capstones

Vibrio parahaemolyticus is a genetically diverse marine bacterium and the leading cause of seafood-borne bacterial illness in the United States. While most strains are harmless, some can cause illness. As oyster aquaculture grows in the Northeast, particularly in New Hampshire’s Great Bay Estuary (GBE), understanding the dynamics of V. parahaemolyticus population diversity and persistence is critical for public health and sustainable aquaculture production. This work investigates two major research questions: whether standard bacterial enumeration methods introduce bias when evaluating diversity of V. parahaemolyticus populations, and how environmental factors influence V. parahaemolyticus acquisition and microbiome development in juvenile oysters. We first …

“How Do You Replicate A Relationship?” An Exploration Of How A School-Community Partnership Was Conceptualized And Enacted, Emilie Coppinger

Doctoral Dissertations

With concerns about supporting students’ overall wellness on the rise, school-community partnerships offer a promising solution. These collaborations can improve outcomes for students, schools, and communities by bringing together diverse expertise and funding sources. However, how these partnerships are formed and maintained, as well as how stakeholders are included in them, needs further exploration. To address this gap, the current study follows a collaboration between a school district and local health agency from the project’s initiation through its execution. The research approach and study design draw on the traditions of community-based research and ethnography, guiding my data collection and representation …

A Daughter’S Inheritance: The Construction Of Motherhood Through Death, Michaela George

Doctoral Dissertations

Mother-daughter relationships have been of feminist interest for decades as this relationship shifts narrative focus to underrepresented characters. In literature their relationship illustrates and complicates what it means to be ‘woman’ and provides access to educational theories, political understanding, and familial ideologies. Further, examining how these relationships shift and alter through eras of narratives offers tangible patterns for study. My dissertation examines the mother-daughter relationships in late eighteenth-century, early nineteenth-century prose by investigating how social constructions of gender are complicated, critiqued, shaped, and altered as they are passed from parent to child in deathbed scenes. I engage with medical humanities …

Static Risk Sensitive Reinforcement Learning, Jia Lin Hau

Doctoral Dissertations

Reinforcement Learning (RL) is a core area of artificial intelligence (AI) that enables systems to make decisions in complex environments. RL algorithms have shown promise in various domains, including resource management, robotics, and games. However, most existing RL approaches fail to account for the risks associated with decision-making. This oversight becomes particularly critical in high-stakes settings, such as healthcare, finance, criminal justice, and autonomous driving, where poor decisions can have significant consequences.

To address risk in decision-making, another line of research explores the properties (axioms) of "desirable" risk measures. This desirability is defined as the ability to quantify the capital …

Logistic Regression And Cox Hazard Modeling With Sparse High Dimensional Data Via Elastic Net Regularization And Graph-Guided Aggregation, Matthew Duckett

Doctoral Dissertations

Rare features are predictor variables with excessively low rates of nonzeros. It is not uncommon to encounter rare features in settings where data is quantified through one-hot encoding, such as text mining data or genomic data. Rare features pose problems for classic regression techniques due to instability of effect estimates. The problem is compoundedwhen the dimension of the feature space is high. Yan and Bien (2020) explored methods for aggregating rare features in high dimensions by leveraging side-information about relations between features that can be organized as a tree graph. While their work is restricted to standard Gaussian regression, we …

Dimensions Of Green Crabs, Carcinus Maenas (Linnaeus 1785), And Oysters, Crassostrea Virginica (Gmelin 1791), In Great Bay Estuary, New Hampshire, Kelsey Meyer

Doctoral Dissertations

Invasive species may alter how an ecosystem functions, such as the Great Bay Estuary (GBE) inNew Hampshire. In GBE, an invasive species of particular interest is the green cab (Carcinus maenas) because historically (and currently) there are no mitigation or eradication plans that have been implemented. It is not well-known how green crabs are interacting with oysters in GBE, whether that be wild, restored, or aquacultured. The aim of this dissertation was to document NH oyster growers’ perspectives on the issue of green crabs and oyster predation, understand their abundance, distribution and diet among natural/restored oyster areas and oyster farms …

Double Segregated Districts And The Persistence Of The Education Debt: A Study In Three Research Essays – Desegregation, The Education Debt, And Brown To Brownsville: A Case Study., Shantel Palacio

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation investigates the persistence of double segregation—the racial and socioeconomic isolation of students—in New York City public schools. Using a three-article, mixed-methods design grounded in Gloria Ladson-Billings’ education debt framework, it explores how legal precedent, school-level demographics, and community perspectives interact to sustain unequal educational opportunity.The first article provides a legal-historical analysis tracing desegregation efforts from Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) to IntegrateNYC v. State of New York (2024). Using the IRAC method, it examines how federal courts shifted from enforcing desegregation to limiting race-conscious remedies, leading advocates to pursue equity through state-based legal strategies. The article highlights the increasing …

Age Distribution Of Minors Portrayed In Image-Based Sexual Abuse And Child Sexual Abuse Material, Samantha Jean Sutton

Doctoral Dissertations

Child sexual abuse material (CSAM) poses a significant threat, especially in the current technological age. A better understanding of victim characteristics is needed to direct investigation and prevention efforts properly. However, determining the age distribution of children in CSAM has been difficult due to numerous factors, including differing laws governing CSAM, the priority placed on investigating younger victims, and the difficulty of determining from images alone the age of young people. This meta-analysis sought to understand the proportion of image abuse victims who are under the age of 13 compared to those who are 13 years or older and whether …

Investigating The Role Of Soundscape Properties And Genetic Material As Sentinel Indicators Of The Acoustic Environment In Gulf Of Maine Coastal Marine Ecosystems, Grant Alexander Milne

Doctoral Dissertations

ABSTRACT By identifying soundscape properties and taxa detected with metabarcoding that accurately predict substrate composition, assumptions about propagative properties of the environment can be rapidly formed without the use of active acoustic sensing or invasive environmental sampling techniques. “Sentinel indicators,” are variables, processes, or components within ecosystems that can be measured or quantified and have sensitivity to environmental pressures. Passive acoustic monitoring (PAM) and metabarcoding of seawater samples (MSS) are two minimally invasive potential methods of identifying sentinel indicators of soundscape and propagation properties of marine habitats by detecting the presence of marine taxa and extracting information from soundscapes. To …

Design And Synthesis Of Single Atom Catalysts For Solar Fuel Generation, Allison Harper St. John

Doctoral Dissertations

Solar fuel generation from photocatalytic carbon dioxide (CO2) reduction is a growing area of interest to mitigate global energy and climate crises. Graphitic carbon nitride (C3N4) is a light-absorbing semiconductor with a promising outlook for solar fuels, gaining popularity in recent years due to its low cost and appropriate band positions for many environmentally relevant reactions. The addition of atomically dispersed single atom catalysts (SACs) to semiconducting materials is a viable strategy for creating active sites to improve photocatalytic performance of the semiconductors studied. Designing C3N4 materials as a support for SACs with well-defined binding motifs and sufficiently high concentrations …

The Role Of The Gut Microbiota In Opioid Use Disorder, Izabella Jannae Sall

Doctoral Dissertations

Opioids are highly effective analgesics for acute and chronic pain management but carry dangerous side effects that limit their utility and increase the risk of opioid use disorder (OUD). Yet not all individuals prescribed opioids develop an OUD, presenting a conundrum: why are so some individuals develop an OUD and others do not? While genetics, social environment, and behavior contribute to risk, they fail to explain why some individuals transition from prescribed use to an OUD. My doctoral research investigates an increasingly likely culprit that is also a promising therapeutic target: the gut microbiota. The gut microbiota is essential for …

Responding To Range Expansion: Assessing Insect Communities, Tree Decline Symptoms, And Tree Mortality Risk As The Southern Pine Beetle Moves North, Caroline Rachel Kanaskie

Doctoral Dissertations

Climate change is shifting species distributions. In New England, warmer winters allow southern species to survive further north. The northward range expansion of the tree-killing southern pine beetle is the focus of this dissertation. Outbreaks of this beetle cause both ecological and economic damage, which threaten the globally rare pine barrens ecosystem. I used an interdisciplinary approach to study this insect: 1) I synthesized literature on the beetle’s natural enemies; 2) I used a suite of chemical attractants to investigate the insect community attracted to the beetle’s pheromones and assessed the diversity and abundance of its potential predators; 3) I …

Molecular Simulation Studies Of Peptide Transport Across The Mitochondrial Membrane, Son Nguyen

Doctoral Dissertations

Molecular transport across membranes is an important biophysical process. Designing molecules capable of crossing cell membranes and targeting specific organelle is becoming necessary in treating many diseases and disorders. In recent decades, cell-penetrating peptides have been studied and utilized to deliver a variety of cargoes. My dissertation work focuses on studying the molecular details of the peptide translocation process across a cell membrane. Specifically, I investigated the dynamics of mitochondrial-targeting peptides and their mechanisms of translocation across the mitomembrane. I conducted molecular dynamics (MD) simulations of model mitochondrial-targeting peptides with distinct physical and chemical properties such as sequence lengths, functional …

Evaluation Of The Role Of Bet Inhibitors On The Bone Marrow Microenvironment, Victoria Aumann Dos Reis

Master's Theses and Capstones

Waldenström Macroglobulinemia (WM) is an incurable subtype of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma characterized by high levels of circulating serum IgM and bone marrow infiltration by malignant cells. As in other hematological malignancies, the tumor microenvironment (TME) is crucial for tumorigenesis and survival of WM cells. The TME is composed by non-cancer cells, including stromal and endothelial cells, immune cells, and adipocytes, metabolites, lymphatic and blood vessels, extracellular matrix, and signaling components, such as chemokines, cytokines and growth factors. Bone marrow stromal cells (BMSCs) are essential for hematopoiesis, since they secrete stromal factors and cytokines, including Interleukin (IL)-6. IL-6 modulates the secretion of …

Eastern Oyster Behavioral And Morphological Response To External Stimuli, Michaela Edwards

Master's Theses and Capstones

Oysters are known to provide ecosystem services such as improving water quality, and providing habitats to other organisms, in addition to their role as economically important organisms. Many of these services are tied to the gaping behavior oysters exhibit, opening their shells to filter water and grow. Oysters are known to be impacted by many biological and abiotic factors, including predators, biofouling, and handing stressors. Past work has investigated oyster mortality and growth relating to predation and implementation of different cage and bag cleaning frequencies on farms. However, there is limited research regarding how oyster gaping behavior changes in relation …