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Personal Strength As A Core Dimension Of Posttraumatic Growth: A Multi-Method Study Of U.S. Military Veterans, Steven Moore

Social Work Dissertations

U.S. military veterans are frequently exposed to traumatic and morally challenging experiences that can disrupt core assumptions about identity, purpose, and control. While much of the veteran mental health literature has emphasized psychological distress and functional impairment, growing attention has been directed toward posttraumatic growth and strengths-based outcomes. This dissertation examined posttraumatic growth among U.S. military veterans with a specific focus on personal strength as a central dimension of growth following trauma.

Using a multi-method design, this dissertation integrated findings from three complementary studies. First, a scoping review mapped how posttraumatic growth, personal strength, and related constructs have been conceptualized, …

The Cost Of Care: A Mixed Methods Study Of Social Work Student Well-Being, Practicum Pay, And The Future Of Feminized Care In The Health Workforce, Christian Adeleke

Social Work Dissertations

Social work field education, commonly enacted as the practicum, is widely regarded as the profession’s signature pedagogy, yet its material conditions—particularly the prevalence of unpaid or minimally compensated placements—are rarely problematized. This dissertation examined the financial, academic, and well-being consequences of practicum participation among social work students and the mechanisms through which these consequences arise. Using an embedded mixed methods design, the study analyzed secondary data from the Payment for Placements (P4P) survey (N = 618), combining a moderated-mediation structural equation model with a reflexive thematic analysis of open-ended narrative responses. Drawing on feminist political economy and social reproduction …

Ai For Life Sciences: From Geometric Protein Modeling To Multimodal Drug Design, Feng Jiang

Computer Science and Engineering Dissertations

Predicting biomolecular interactions, from immune recognition to drug–target binding, is a central problem in the life sciences and computational drug discovery. Deep learning has advanced this area, yet three challenges persist: the topology of large, highly imbalanced interaction networks; structural noise in computationally predicted protein models; and the integration of multimodal information such as functional text and taxonomic annotations. This dissertation develops a coherent set of models spanning immune complex prediction and small-molecule drug design: graph learning that addresses network topology and severe class imbalance; a noise-tolerant method that fuses predicted structures with evolutionary sequence features; and multimodal representation learning …

Community Narratives On Addressing Gender And Power-Based Violence: Asian/Pacific Islander Voices From Dc, Maryland, And Virginia; An Oral History Of The Asian/Pacific Islander Domestic Violence Resource Project (Dvrp), Linda Kuo

Social Work Theses - Archive

Between 16% and 55% of A/PI women and 8.4% of men report experiencing intimate partner violence in their lifetime (API GBV, 2020). The DC, Maryland, and Virginia tri-state region is home to a growing Asian/Pacific Islander (A/PI) population and calls for further learning about their culturally relevant social services. The Asian/Pacific Islander Domestic Violence Resource Project (DVRP) is the only pan-A/PI specific anti-violence organization in this area. Grounded in intersectionality and collective memory theory, the current study employs oral history methodology to interview 14 individuals involved in supporting A/PI survivors, who are and have been part of the DVRP community. …

Atypical Antipsychotic-Induced Weight Gain Preventive Bundle: A Quality Improvement Project, Jocelyn Urbano

Doctor of Nursing Practice (DNP) Scholarly Projects - Archive

Antipsychotic-induced weight gain (AIWG) is a common, clinically significant adverse effect associated with second-generation antipsychotic medications and contributes to increased cardiometabolic risk among individuals with serious mental illness (SMI; Carolan et al., 2025; Hegde et al., 2024). Individuals experiencing homelessness or social instability often encounter additional barriers to maintaining healthy lifestyle behaviors and consistent engagement in healthcare, further increasing metabolic risks and treatment issues (Hamel et al., 2024; Kelly et al., 2025). This preventive care bundle, designed to reduce the risk of AIWG, was implemented in an outpatient behavioral health clinic serving an underserved urban Texas population.

As metformin may …

Development And Validation Of An Analytical Method For Quantitative Determination Of Small Aldehydes In Plasma, Stephanie T. Clark

Chemistry & Biochemistry Theses - Archive

Small aldehydes such as formaldehyde and acetaldehyde are highly reactive metabolites that play important roles in biological processes related to oxidative stress, metabolism, and DNA damage. Because of their chemical reactivity, volatility, and low endogenous concentrations, accurate measurement of these compounds in biological samples remains analytically challenging. The goal was to develop and evaluate a practical analytical method for detecting small aldehydes in biologically relevant matrices using headspace gas chromatography mass spectrometry (HS-GC-MS). The method combined chemical derivatization with O-(2,3,4,5,6-pentafluorobenzyl)hydroxylamine (PFBHA) and headspace sampling to stabilize aldehydes and enable selective detection by mass spectrometry. Method development focused on optimizing derivatization …

Ai-Driven Network Orchestration: Adaptive Routing For Federated Learning Over Software-Defined Hybrid Wans, Osama Abu Hamdan

Computer Science and Engineering Dissertations - Archive

Modern wide-area networks increasingly adopt hybrid architectures that combine high-capacity wired backbones with flexible wireless links to extend connectivity to remote and underserved locations. However, the bandwidth variability inherent in wireless segments creates routing challenges that traditional protocols, designed for static link capacities, cannot adequately address. Simultaneously, Federated Learning (FL) has emerged as a privacy-preserving distributed machine learning paradigm in which geographically dispersed clients collaboratively train shared models without exchanging raw data. When deployed over wide-area networks, FL training is severely bottlenecked by communication overhead, particularly in cross-silo settings where model payloads reach hundreds of megabytes and synchronous aggregation protocols …

Towards Multimodal Guideline-Aligned Agentic Systems, Wenliang Zhong

Computer Science and Engineering Dissertations - Archive

I present my work on building multimodal guideline-aligned agentic systems designed to enable AI agents to solve complex real-world tasks. My research addresses two critical perspectives: (1) Instruction-Aware Embedding Models for flexible and universal embedding tasks, and (2) Guideline-Driven LLM Agents that leverage domain-specific guidelines to perform expert-level tasks. These components address embedding and generation tasks, respectively, and lay the foundation for a hybrid agent capable of tackling challenging real-world applications.

From the embedding perspective, I first address the instruction-following capabilities of embedding models. While Large Language Models (LLMs) excel at instruction following, they are primarily designed for generation rather …

Characterization Of Tomographic Piv System For Single-Phase Immersion Cooling Applications, Joel Joshua Oommen

Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Theses

As the rapid expansion of Artificial Intelligence (AI) infrastructure and High-Performance Computing (HPC) pushes power requirements to new heights, traditional air-cooling methods have become inadequate for modern server demands. Consequently, single-phase immersion cooling (SPIC) has emerged as one of the effective and sustainable alternatives, utilizing dielectric fluids to remove heat through direct contact with electronic components. Despite numerous thermal and reliability studies, the complex three-dimensional movement of buoyant thermal plumes around intricate component shapes are not yet fully understood in confined spaces.

This thesis provides a detailed characterization of Tomo-PIV and a component level experimental study of flow patterns in …

Scaling Llm Inference: From Novel Attention Mechanisms To Efficient Kv Cache Management, Weishu Deng

Computer Science and Engineering Dissertations

The rapid scaling of artificial intelligence workloads has shifted the dominant performance bottleneck of modern computing systems from compute to memory. Graph neural networks (GNNs) issue increasingly irregular memory accesses, while large language models (LLMs) issue increasingly large ones; in both cases, the relative scaling of memory bandwidth and capacity continues to lag behind the scaling of compute. Consequently, naively executing these workloads on commodity GPUs results in stalled streaming multiprocessors, exhausted high-bandwidth memory (HBM), and serving stacks that incur PCIe transfers on the critical path. This dissertation argues that the efficient scaling of attention-based AI workloads requires the joint …

Multimodal Deep Learning For Biological Data Understanding, Saiyang Na

Computer Science and Engineering Dissertations

This dissertation presents three contributions to multimodal deep learning for biological data understanding, addressing the fundamental challenge of cross-modal alignment from two complementary perspectives: designing effective multimodal fusion methods for specific biomedical applications, and proposing a general framework for higher-order multimodal alignment that captures hierarchical structure in data.

First, we develop Cmai, a deep learning framework for B cell receptor (BCR) to antigen binding prediction that aligns BCR sequence information with antigen three-dimensional structures using contrastive learning. Cmai achieves an average AUROC of 0.907 across 17 antigens and 5 independent cohorts, and demonstrates clinical utility in predicting immune checkpoint inhibitor …

Spatial Temporal Modeling Of Infectious Disease Patterns In Texas, Robert E. Lashbrook

Earth & Environmental Sciences Theses

The Texas Department of State Health Services monitors numerous notifiable conditions statewide, including Campylobacter, Salmonella, Shiga toxin-producing Escherichia coli (STEC), Rabies, and West Nile virus (WNV). Given the substantial health, economic, and public health burden associated with these conditions, improving prediction is an important step toward reducing their overall impact. This study evaluated whether external demographic, social, climate, and environmental data could improve prediction of county-year disease activity across Texas. County level data was analyzed using supervised machine learning models, including linear regression, ridge regression, multilayer perceptron, random forest, XGBoost, as well as K-means clustering to identify broader …

Chaotic Complexity: Order And Chaos In Works Of Cage, Xenakis And Boulez, Levi Graham

Music Theses

My thesis explores specific applications of chaos theory in contemporary twentieth-century music and analyzes the relationship between order and chaos in their creation. I will do this by referencing the levels of chaos presented by Katherine Hayles and categorized by Judith Lochhead. These levels of chaos include “Expressive Chaos,” “Denotative Chaos,” and “Ontological Chaos,” which provide a framework for grouping expressions of chaos in music.  I will analyze works of John Cage, Iannis Xenakis and Pierre Boulez through the lens of these types of chaos, with a particular focus on “Ontological Chaos,” which describes chaos as both dependent on and …

Investigating The Viability Of Fully Online Asynchronous Physics Instruction In Formal Education, Clifton W. Massey-Noel

Physics Dissertations

In this dissertation we present results from two consecutive investigations into the fully online asynchronous modality in Physics Education. We first discuss the efficacy of a fully online asynchronous section of Modern Physics held in Fall 2024. The asynchronous section is compared with four prior partially-flipped sections of the same class, two of which were held in-person, and two of which were held synchronously online. Results suggest that all three modalities can be made to be about equally as effective. We also discuss the efficacy of a fully online asynchronous section of Calculus-Based Introductory Mechanics held in Fall 2025. The …

Proposed Design Approach Of Bolted Cruciform Stiffened End-Plate Connections And Bolted Circular Flange Plate Connections Under Combined Loading For Enhanced Economy And Performance, Cesar E. Aguirre

Civil Engineering Dissertations

This research will deliver a substantive contribution to the advancement of design practice for bolted circular flange connections and cruciform stiffened end-plate connections — critically evaluating existing approaches, identifying their limitations, and proposing evidence-based design frameworks that enhance structural performance, predictability, and safety across relevant engineering applications.In addition provide economical benefits.

Equitable Siting Of Green Stormwater Infrastructure In Urban Areas For Flood Resilience In Vulnerable Communities, Elnaz Chitsazzadeh

Planning Dissertations

Cities face increasing pressure from rapid urbanization, aging gray infrastructure, intensifying rainfall, and uneven flood protection. In this context, green stormwater infrastructure (GSI) and other nature-based solutions are increasingly promoted as tools for climate adaptation, flood resilience, and environmental justice. Yet a central planning challenge remains: how to identify where GSI should be prioritized when flood-related physical burden, weak environmental protection, social vulnerability, and lower recovery capacity overlap. This dissertation addresses that challenge in Fort Worth, Texas, by examining how equitable GSI siting can support flood resilience in vulnerable urban neighborhoods.

Framed by urban resilience and environmental justice, the study …

The Voices Of Women Politicians: Media Representation And Its Influence On Identity, Gender Bias, And Self-Presentation, Ariana J. Hernandez

Communication Theses

This study examines how women in politics view and respond to media representation, shifting the focus from analyzing content to understanding the personal experiences and strategic choices of the politicians themselves. Through semi-structured interviews with 15 women in political roles, the research looks at the mental and emotional effort needed to navigate a media landscape shaped by gender.

The findings highlight a significant gap between how these women see themselves and how the media portrays them. They often feel that professional credibility must be built over time rather than being granted automatically. Participants pointed out common gendered portrayals, such as …

Navigating Yellow Zone Sexual Misconduct Cases: Exploring Title Ix Administrators’ Discretion, Angela E. Hobbs

Educational Leadership & Policy Studies Dissertations

This study examines how Title IX administrators exercise discretion when responding to ambiguous sexual misconduct reports referred to as yellow zone. The 2020 Title IX Rules and Regulations introduced a more restrictive definition of sexual misconduct, requiring behavior to be severe, pervasive, and objectively offensive (SPOO) to meet the threshold for formal institutional response. Despite the practical challenges these cases present for institutions, there is limited scholarly understanding of how Title IX administrators make decisions when responding to them. Guided by street-level bureaucracy theory (Lipsky, 1969, 1980, 2010), the study explored how institutional actors exercise discretion in response to regulatory …

Advancing Lipidomics Through Fluoroalcohol-Induced Multiphase Fractionation And Orthogonal Lc×Lc–Ms Detection, Md Al Amin

Chemistry & Biochemistry Dissertations

Comprehensive characterization of the lipidome remains a significant analytical challenge due to the immense structural diversity, wide dynamic range, and complex physicochemical continuum of lipid species. Conventional extraction methods, such as those by Bligh–Dyer and Folch, and one-dimensional liquid chromatography (1D-LC) often fail to resolve this complexity, leading to chromatographic overlap, severe ion suppression, and limited coverage of low-abundance or highly hydrophobic species. This dissertation addresses these bottlenecks by establishing a separation-driven analytical framework that integrates novel fluoroalcohol-induced multiphase systems (FAiTPS) with orthogonal multidimensional liquid chromatography–mass spectrometry (LC×LC–MS).

The core of this research is the development and physicochemical characterization of …

Family Factors And Adolescent Behavior: How Parenting Practices And Parent-Child Relationships Shape Internalizing And Externalizing Behaviors, Angela J. Spikes

Social Work Dissertations

Mental health challenges can emerge across childhood and adolescence, often manifesting as internalizing and externalizing behaviors. These outcomes are shaped by the complex interplay of environmental and contextual influences, particularly parenting practices and family dynamics. This study examines how parental practices and caregiver-child relationship quality influence adolescent internalizing and externalizing behaviors while accounting for key sociodemographic factors, including sex, race/ethnicity, maternal education, income, and household structure. Using a longitudinal design, secondary data were drawn from the Future of Families and Child Well-being Study. The analytic sample included adolescents and caregivers with data from Wave 5 (Year 9) and Wave 6 …

Testing The Influence Of Increased Predation On The Evolution Of Morphological Coloration Plasticity In Trinidadian Killifish (Anablepsoides Hartii), Alyssa M. Laux

Biology Theses

The ability to camouflage is a widespread trait in both vertebrates and invertebrates that enhances survival in risky environments. The ability of organisms to respond to shifts in environmental conditions and change color is a conspicuous example of camouflage. Such coloration plasticity can occur rapidly (seconds to minutes) versus longer periods of time (days to months). There are numerous examples of physiological coloration plasticity (short-term) and morphological coloration plasticity (long-term). Yet, there are few tests of the conditions that drive the evolution of physiological vs. morphological coloration plasticity. In this study we use Trinidadian killifish (Anablepsoides hartii) as …

The Efficacy Of Co-Response Teams: A Scoping Review, Kristen N. Burkhart

Social Work Theses

This scoping review explores co-response teams, a coordinated response consisting of a mental health professional (MHP) and a law enforcement official (LEO). It examines the implementation, effectiveness, and outcomes of these interventions, highlighting barriers and facilitators of co-response teams. The review analyzed peer-reviewed studies from the years 2016-2026. Using the Arskey & O’Malley framework, an initial database search yielded 691 studies of which 30 were included in this review.  The review identifies four areas of ideas: legal system diversion and outcomes, frontline stakeholders' roles and friction, specialized co-response teams, and systemic barriers and resource constraints. Significant gaps remain in long-term …

Virtualized And Distributed Neighborhood Data Centers, Benjamin T. Niccum

Computer Science and Engineering Theses

This thesis evaluates whether PCIe-fabric-based resource pooling can support a decentralized neighborhood micro-data-center model under real implementation constraints. The work combines architecture design, prototype deployment, performance benchmarking, and security assessment. Results show strong prototype-scale feasibility with low-latency and high-throughput behavior, while also identifying deployment-blocking security gaps and operational maturity requirements. The thesis contributes an evidence-traceable path from concept validation to deployment-grade roadmap planning.

Systematic Approaches To Characterizing Vulnerabilities And Enhancing Robustness Of Text And Vision-Language Models, Poojitha Thota

Computer Science and Engineering Dissertations

The proliferation of artificial intelligence (AI) across critical domains, including news summarization, privacy-policy analysis, and medical decision support, has raised growing concerns about the security and robustness of these systems against adversarial manipulation. This dissertation investigates adversarial robustness in generative AI by addressing three key research goals: (1) characterizing adversarial vulnerabilities across generative models, (2) developing systematic defenses to improve the robustness of generative models, and (3) designing deployment-time safeguards for securing LLM interactions.

Towards the first goal, we characterize adversarial vulnerabilities across text-based and multimodal systems. In abstractive text summarization, we show that inference-time perturbations can exploit lead bias …

Effect Of Mid-Range Ultraviolet Light On Avian Embryonic Development, Keelie Hughes

Biology Theses

While it is a known fact that specific environmental conditions must be met to ensure proper embryonic development, the impact of changes in this delicate balance is unclear. Ultraviolet (UV) light has a narrow range of effectiveness in mature tissue, where too little can hinder molecular signaling and too much can cause damage to genetic material. This study exposed in ovo chicken embryos in the preliminary stages of development to mid-range UV radiation to examine developing embryo and tissue morphology using anthropometric methods and comparing proliferative cells among embryos exposed to varying doses of UV light. Additionally, quantitative polymerase chain …

The Rise In Height And Curb Weight Of The Top-Selling Vehicles In The United States From 1991 - 2025: Implications For Engineering Design And Vulnerable Road Users, Samuel L. Steinman-Friedman

Civil Engineering Theses

Road fatalities are higher in the United States than in other high-income regions. In 2024, 39,254 people died on roads in the United States compared to 19,940 in the European Union. These two regions have comparable exposure metrics, such as population size, roadway network length, and fatalities per mile traveled. Light trucks dominate the U.S. market, whereas hatchbacks are prevalent in Europe. The trendline of the average height and curb weight of the top-selling vehicles in the United States has increased by 0.24 inches and 23.52 pounds per year since 1991. The average 2025 top-selling U.S. passenger vehicle is 7.5 …

Integrated Thermal, Energy, And Structural Performance Assessment Of A Novel In-Service Shallow Geothermal Bridge Deicing System, Alireza Fakhrabadi

Civil Engineering Dissertations

Understanding the performance of bridge deck deicing systems under winter weather conditions is important for improving transportation safety and reducing long-term deterioration of bridge infrastructure. Bridge decks are more vulnerable to icing than ground-supported pavements because they are exposed to ambient air, wind, and radiation from multiple directions, while they do not receive thermal support from the underlying soil. Conventional deicing methods, especially chloride-based salts, can reduce ice formation in the short term, but repeated application may accelerate reinforcement corrosion, concrete damage, and environmental concerns. Therefore, shallow geothermal energy has been considered as a sustainable alternative for bridge deck deicing …

Improving Hypertension Management With An Educational Patient Intervention Bundle, Gertie Silva

Doctor of Nursing Practice (DNP) Scholarly Projects

Aim

Uncontrolled hypertension remains a significant risk factor for cardiovascular disease. This quality improvement project aimed to improve hypertension knowledge and blood pressure control among adults with uncontrolled hypertension by implementing lifestyle counseling, home blood pressure monitoring, and regular follow-up.

Design

This quality improvement project used a pre- and post-intervention design.

Methods

Forty-one adults with uncontrolled hypertension took part in an eight-week educational program. Outcomes measured included weight, systolic and diastolic blood pressure, and HK-LS scores. Descriptive statistics and paired-samples t-tests analyzed the results.

Results

Participants showed significant improvements in weight, blood pressure, and hypertension knowledge. Mean weight decreased from …

Reducing Live Discharges In Hospice Care Through A Bundled Intervention, Fiona P. White

Doctor of Nursing Practice (DNP) Scholarly Projects

Introduction

 Among Medicare fee-for-service hospice beneficiaries, the national live discharge rate increased from 16.9% in FY2021 to 19.1% in FY2025. At a Medicare-certified hospice agency in a southern state, the pre-intervention live discharge rate of 35.3% substantially exceeded national norms, with 68.7% of events representing patient-initiated revocations.

Methods

 A pre-post quality improvement design guided by the Plan-Do-Study-Act framework was implemented over 8 weeks at a single site with 106 newly admitted hospice patients and 15 clinical staff. The four-component bundled intervention comprised Revocation Risk Assessment administration within 24 hours of admission, structured patient and caregiver education within 72 hours of …

Toolkit To Prevent Venous Thromboembolism Among Surgical Patients, Carine Wawa

Doctor of Nursing Practice (DNP) Scholarly Projects

Background: According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, approximately 900,000 people in the United States are affected annually by venous thromboembolism (VTE) (CDC, 2025). The surgical patient population is vulnerable to VTE due to factors such as immobility, tissue injuries, and inflammatory responses. The lack of standardized protocols for surgical patients causes practice variability among healthcare providers and potentially increases the risk for preventable VTE events.

Methods: A toolkit to prevent VTE was developed utilizing the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) National Quality Measures Clearinghouse (NQMC). A literature review was conducted, reviewed, and graded using the …