Digital Commons Network^™

Differences Are Not Deficits: Women Introverting While Black Through The Ascent To Executive Leadership In Higher Education, Jeri A. Bingham

Dissertations

Diversity of personality type in the workplace can lead to improved morale and productivity when organizations acknowledge and support the attributes and differences of employee behaviors and characteristics. Black women executives identifying as introverted who lead with their authentic personas and intersected marginalized identities, benefit employers, employees, students, and the institution’s brand and bottom line. Introversion and extroversion, ways to describe diversity of personality type, and each having different connotations in office culture, are relevant to this exploration as literature suggests that the population of both personality types is almost evenly distributed. The implications of judgement and the association to …

Reclaiming Healing Spaces: A Phenomenological Study On The Transformative Power Of Outdoor Therapy From The Lived Experiences Of Black Clinicians Working With Black Clients, Lynn Murphy

Dissertations

This phenomenological study involved assessing the experiences of Black therapists who engaged Black clients in outdoor therapeutic contexts. The study was founded on the existing literature that shows the quality of the therapeutic relationship is pivotal for client retention and the Western standards that have historically favored treatment within indoor environments. To contextualize this research, a comprehensive literature review was commenced, covering topics such as the decolonization of therapy, the historical and present-day relationship between Blacks and the outdoors in the United States, sedentary lifestyles, the psychological benefits of time spent in nature, various types of outdoor therapy, and the …

Infertility’S Impact On Couples’ Functioning, Elizabeth Sanders

Dissertations

Historically, infertility has been a taboo topic of discussion and is often avoided in conversation because of the stigmatization of the diagnosis. According to the World Health Organization (2022), infertility affects 186 million individuals globally. However, there seems to be a gap in the research as it pertains to the psychological well-being and treatment of men and women diagnosed with this condition. While it has become less of a feared topic, it still is not discussed or researched enough, thus further exacerbating the gap in research on mental health and treatment options. The following dissertation completed a critical review of …

Evaluation Of Educator Outcomes Of Teaching Social-Emotional Learning, Mindfulness, And Life Skills, Gary Mccarthy

Dissertations

There have been many studies documenting the benefits of social – emotional (SEL) instruction for students, but fewer on how teaching SEL curriculums may alleviate teacher burnout. I used a mixed methods research design to investigate the impact of teaching social-emotional learning, mindfulness, and life skills through The Leader in Me (LiM), a K-12 whole-school improvement model based on The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People on educators. The outcomes of surveys and interviews indicated that most educators in my study reported personal and professional benefits from teaching and modeling the program. My recommendations include further implementation of SEL, Mindfulness, …

Investigating The Neurovascular Correlates Of Cognitive Function In Individuals With Spinal Cord Injury Using Functional Near-Infrared Spectroscopy, Donna Yali Chen

Dissertations

Individuals with spinal cord injury (SCI) have a 13 times greater risk of cognitive impairment than able-bodied individuals and commonly report symptoms of depression and anxiety. The reports of cognitive impairment in individuals with SCI are independent of concomitant brain injury. Although the direct cause of cognitive impairment in individuals with SCI is unknown, key contributors may include comorbid depression, chronic pain, anxiety, fatigue, brain injury, or cardiovascular dysfunction. Previous studies have focused on SCI at the level of the spinal cord but have under-investigated the supraspinal levels. Due to the lack of neuroimaging studies on SCI rehabilitation, it is …

Enhancing Community Flood Resilience By Incorporating Landscape Hydrological Sensitivity And Connectivity, Wenlong Feng

Dissertations

Rapid urban expansion and dramatic climate change have significantly increased the intensity and frequency of floods worldwide. With rising flood risks, conventional flood defense strategies that rely on structural measures become ineffective. The present designations for flood-prone areas, such as FEMA's flood maps, are becoming unreliable. Flood risk management is shifting toward enhancing community flood resilience, highlighting the importance of non-structural approaches. Landscape resilience has become a foundation of community flood resilience. However, past urban development typically undermined natural hydro-ecological functions and landscape resilience because of poor recognition of landscapes' ecological role, hydrological sensitivity, and hydrological connections. This study aims …

Certifying Stability In Runge-Kutta Schemes: Algebraic Conditions And Semidefinite Programming, Austin Juhl

Dissertations

Numerical stability is a critical property for a time-integration scheme. In the context of Runge-Kutta methods applied to stiff differential equations, A-stability is one of the most basic and practically important notions of stability. Dating back to the work of Dahlquist, it has been known that A-stability is equivalent to the Runge-Kutta stability function satisfying a particular convex feasibility problem. Specifically, up to a transformation, the stability function lies in the convex cone of positive functions. In recent years, sum-of-squares optimization and semidefinite programming have become valuable tools in developing rigorous certificates of stability in dynamical systems. Therefore, it is …

Federated Learning Systems For Mobile Sensing Data, Xiaopeng Jiang

Dissertations

Federated Learning (FL) has emerged as a new distributed Deep Learning (DL) paradigm that enables privacy-aware training and inference on mobile devices with help from the cloud. This dissertation presents a comprehensive exploration of FL with mobile sensing data, covering systems, applications, and optimizations.

First, a mobile-cloud FL system, FLSys, is designed to balance model performance with resource consumption, tolerate communication failures, and achieve scalability. In FLSys, different DL models with different FL aggregation methods can be trained and accessed concurrently by different apps. In addition, FLSys provides advanced privacy-preserving mechanisms and a common API for third-party app developers to …

Data Driven Decision Making For Sustainable Planning And Operations Of Large Scale Networks, Bahareh Kargar

Dissertations

This dissertation explores data-driven decision-making networks, focusing on sustainable planning and operations for large-scale systems such as healthcare supply chains and power systems. One significant application in healthcare is the optimization of vaccine supply chains. An agent-based simulation-optimization modeling framework is developed to enhance the efficiency and sustainability of vaccine distribution. First, an agent-based epidemiological model of COVID-19 is extended to capture disease transmission dynamics and forecast the number of susceptible individuals and infections. Then, a sustainable vaccine supply chain considering the impacts of greenhouse gases is developed and integrated with the simulation model to minimize total costs and environmental …

Electrified Membrane For Water Treatment And Resource Recovery: Advancing Multiscale Strategies In Gas-Involving Reactions, Jianan Gao

Dissertations

Multifunctional, modular, and scalable water treatment technologies that operate without chemical additives are crucial for addressing global water pollution challenges. While traditional membrane-based separation processes are crucial for ensuring clean water supplies, they primarily focus on pollutant removal rather than on the upcycling of pollutants into valuable resources. Electrified membrane filtration presents a robust alternative, utilizing minimal or no chemical additives and harnessing electrical power to directly reduce contaminants or produce reactive oxidants or reductants on-site.

This dissertation is dedicated to the development of innovative electrochemically reactive membranes designed to address three major challenges: (1) the engineering of electrocatalysts with …

A Methodological Framework For Ontology Development, Enrichment, And Application In Natural Language Processing Tasks, Navya Martin Kollapally

Dissertations

Electronic Health Records (EHRs) have been widely used in healthcare to record demographics, vital signs, test results, immunizations, medical imaging reports, differential diagnoses, etc. It is now accepted that non-clinical (e.g., social) factors have a substantial influence on health outcomes. Hence, it is desirable to record these Social and Commercial Determinants of Health (SDoH & CDoH) in an EHR. The "non-text parts" of EHR notes (e.g., data tables) rely on coded terms from underlying ontologies or terminologies to facilitate semantic interoperability. Ontologies help define concepts, the relationships between them, and instances that can be utilized in research.

The first accomplishment …

Microwave Catalysis-Enabled Membrane Processes For Microbial Inactivation, Fangzhou Liu

Dissertations

The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the urgent need for advanced technologies to combat virus transmission. Traditional membrane filtration technologies primarily serve as physical barriers, capturing pollutants but failing to inactivate microbial agents such as bacteria and viruses. These membranes typically target larger particles but are ineffective against sub-micrometer viral particles. Thus, there's a critical demand for membrane filtration processes that combine robust filtration with antifouling and reaction -enabled functions for efficient pathogen disinfection. This research explores a novel microwave-assisted membrane filtration process incorporating catalytic reactions to enhance microbial disinfection and prevent membrane fouling, offering a groundbreaking solution to global challenges …

Estimation Of Spo2 Levels And Heart Rate From Ppg Signals In The Presence Of Motion Artifacts, Chizhong Wang

Dissertations

In the rapidly advancing world of health technology, wearable devices are at the forefront, fundamentally changing how individuals monitor their health. The key to this transformation is photoplethysmography (PPG), a non-invasive optical method that measures blood flow variations through the skin by detecting changes in light absorption with each heartbeat. This capability makes PPG essential for monitoring vital signs such as heart rate and blood oxygen saturation(SpO₂). Furthermore, the utility of PPG signals has been extended beyond traditional health metrics to include human activity classification, offering a holistic perspective on an individual's physical health and activity levels, in …

Order-Picking Strategies And Efficiency Models For The Fulfillment Of Multi-Line E-Commerce Grocery Orders, Zijia Wang

Dissertations

The fulfillment process for Buy Online Pickup from Store grocery orders (BOPS-Grocery) is particularly challenging, given the large item count per order and the low-profit margins. This research investigates the BOPS-Grocery model and pursues the following objectives: (i) Defining and specifying the BOPS-Grocery fulfillment process. Differentiating the process from classical warehouse order picking., identifying performance objectives, and characterizing design options and facility layout. (ii) Modelling and developing order picking algorithms specific to the straight aisle section. Formulated as an order hatching problem with picker movement minimization. No order splitting, and (iii) modeling and developing order picking algorithms specific to the …

Numerical Techniques For Improving Simulations Of Tropical Cyclones, Yassine Tissaoui

Dissertations

The increasing frequency and intensity of tropical cyclones (TCs) due to climate change pose significant challenges for forecasting and mitigating their impacts. Despite advancements, accurately predicting TC rapid intensification (RI) remains a challenge. Large eddy simulation (LES) allows for explicitly resolving the large eddies involved in TC turbulence, thus providing an avenue for studying the mechanisms behind their intensification and RI. LES of a full tropical cyclone is very computationally expensive and its accuracy will depend on both explicit and implicit dissipation within an atmospheric model. This dissertation presents two novel numerical methodologies with the potential to improve the efficiency …

Collision Dynamics Of Compound Droplets In Microchannels: A Combined Numerical And Data-Driven Study, S M Abdullah Al Mamun

Dissertations

Understanding and predicting the hydrodynamic interactions of micron-scale droplets is crucial in a wide range of industrial and real-life applications, including microfluidics, pharmaceutics, drug delivery, food science, and enhanced oil recovery. These multi-phase and multi-scale phenomena are further complicated by the presence of core droplets of an immiscible fluid within shell droplets, known as compound droplets. The collisions and interactions of droplets in emulsions are influenced by various physical and geometric parameters, leading to distinct rheological and dynamic responses. This research employs numerical methods for a systematic parametric study of both simple and compound droplet pair collisions under confined shear …

Large Deviation Theory In Stochastic Processes: Applications To Biological Modeling, Moshe C. Silverstein

Dissertations

This dissertation delves into developing and applying stochastic models to analyze complex biological systems. It leverages Large Deviation Theory (LDT) to gain insights into these systems, focusing on two key examples: neural networks and calcium signaling dynamics. Traditional deterministic methods frequently fail to capture biological processes' randomness and inherent variability. Meanwhile, many stochastic approaches struggle to be mathematically tractable or provide accessible insights. The approach introduced in this study provides rigorous mathematical frameworks to enhance understanding of these stochastic behaviors while remaining tractable and insightful.

A stochastic model for a random biological neural network is constructed that addresses the dependencies …

Efficient Numerical Methods For Monge-Ampere Type Equations, Jake S. Brusca

Dissertations

Current numerical methods for Monge-Ampere-type equations and Optimal Transport problems face challenges when handling higher dimensions and large-scale data. This dissertation aims to develop and analyze efficient, highly parallelizable numerical algorithms for solving the Monge-Ampere equation to address these issues. Two approaches are employed:

(1) The discretization method is enhanced by introducing an integral repre-sentation of the Monge-Ampere operator. This integral can be discretized using higher-order quadrature, yielding a more efficient, higher-order monotone scheme that allows for narrower stencils. An additional advantage of this discretization is its natural extension to arbitrary dimensions.

(2) The nonlinear solvers for this scheme are …

An Autoethnography Of A Social Justice-Minded Teacher In Corrections, Graciela Rubalcaba-Munoz

Dissertations

ABSTRACT The incarceration of women has increased 93% in the last fifty years. This impacts marginalized communities at disproportionate rates. Although the provision of education in corrections became federal law in 1952 as a means to rehabilitate inmates, women’s facilities currently do not receive equitable resources to support education, which puts additional pressure on the educational staff. The legal requirement for education includes county jails, the transitory facilities that house inmates while they await court or transfer to prison. The jail educational system is volatile, making it difficult to engage students when there are constant interruptions, unexpected incidents, lockdowns, and …

Caregiver Support For Patients Diagnosed With Dementia, Michelle N. Kabakibi

Dissertations

Background: Current research indicates that caregivers of dementia patients often experience a great deal of stress related to caregiving. Most of these caregivers are informal caregivers without prior knowledge or training in dementia care. Previous studies indicate that informal caregivers often experience stress during this postdiagnosis period due to a lack of high-quality and available information, education, and support services tailored to meet the unique needs of families caring for a dementia patient. Currently published approaches to providing caregivers with information are largely centered on a one-size-fits-all approach.

Purpose: This descriptive qualitative study was conducted to examine the lived experience …

Optimistic Biases On E-Cigarette Cessation: Examining Competing Theoretical Models For Young Adults With And Without Chronic Health Conditions, Eleanor Steffens

Dissertations

The dramatic increase in youth nicotine initiation is an ongoing public health concern and heightens risk for morbidity and mortality, especially among young adults with chronic health conditions. Consequently, there is an urgent need for research exploring potential psychological mechanisms for continued e-cigarette use to aid in the development of targeted cessation interventions and combat the re-emerging nicotine epidemic. Utilizing the Population Assessment of Tobacco and Health (PATH) Study, the present study modeled the impact of optimistic biases for e-cigarette use on e-cigarette cessation interest among young adults with and without chronic health conditions (n=1,827). Results showed that, regardless of …

Using The Home Health Oasis To Promote Advance Care Planning Among Community-Dwelling, Frail Older Adults, Suzanne S. Sullivan

Dissertations

Despite an aging population with increasing proportions of frailty and decline, the rates of documented Advance care plans (ACP), meant to align goals for care with the level of treatment at end-of-life (EOL), are low (~30-40%). Patients expect clinicians to raise the question about serious illness goals for care when the time is right, however, there are a number of barriers to the initiation of these difficult conversations including provider bias and uncertainty. A review of the literature indicates that there are few prognostic indices available for use to identify the right time to initiate EOL conversations based on risk …

A Fundamental Cause Approach To Intimate Partner Violence In Marginalized Populations, Nicholas S. Metheny

Dissertations

Intimate Partner Violence (IPV) is a serious public health concern that transcends partnership types and societies, affecting approximately one-third of women worldwide. Men in same-sex relationships likely experience violence at similar rates. This dissertation takes a fundamental cause approach to social-ecological and minority stress theories, arguing that structural forces are the root causes of violence in two target populations: women residing in low- and middle-income countries (LMIC) and Indigenous men who have sex with men (MSM) in the United States. Consisting of eight chapters, four of which are empirical studies, this body of work creates new knowledge surrounding how social …

Impact Of An Open Access Appointment Scheduling System On No-Show Rates In An Urban Federally Qualified Health Center, Rosemary Ward

Dissertations

No-show medical appointments lead to health disparities and threaten the financial survival of Federally Qualified Health Centers (FQHCs). Open access scheduling eliminates long lead times, a common reason for no-show visits. Preventive health screenings and chronic disease management were drastically reduced during the COVID-19 pandemic, requiring innovative methods to increase access to care. The purpose of this quality improvement (QI) project was to measure the impact of an open access scheduling system on no-show rates in an urban FQHC. A pre-post observational design compared two days per week of no-show data for a span of 10 weeks between two family …

A Secondary Analysis To Inform A Clinical Decision Rule For Predicting Skull Fracture And Intracranial Injury In Children Under Age Two, Elizabeth L. Stone

Dissertations

The purpose of the current study was to identify the variables associated with the risk of closed head injury (CHI) in children under age two with suspected minor head injuries based on age-appropriate, or near age-appropriate, mental status on exam, as defined by a Glascow Coma Score (GCS) of 15 or 14, respectively. The goal was to propose a set of variables that, when considered together, have a high degree of predictive accuracy in identifying CHI in this population. This set of variables could eventually be used to inform a clinical decision rule which may help triage nurses make acuity …

Reading The Prologue Of John's Gospel As Midrash With A View To Examinging A Local Parting Of The Ways, Joseph Mukuna

Dissertations

This dissertation attempts to read the Prologue to John’s Gospel as midrash with the view to examining a local parting of the ways. It is argued that the midrash technique in the Prologue serves to persuade the audience to perceive itself as a religious other. Through John’s use of the midrash technique in the Prologue, there is an engaged effort to create boundaries and construct a new identity for his community. The choice of vocabulary and theological claims are essential markers of how the author intends to construct a new identity. Using rhetorical analysis, the dissertation claims that the Prologue …

It Can Be Lonely At The Top, But It Doesn’T Have To Be: Workplace Loneliness As Experienced By Senior Leaders And Potential Coping Strategies, Kristen Prince

Dissertations

Workplace loneliness is a topic of growing interest among scholars and practitioners, in part because of the known impacts of loneliness on individuals’ well-being and performance. Recent literature has suggested that senior leaders may be vulnerable to feelings of workplace loneliness but lacks a thorough depiction of how leaders experience and cope with the feelings. This qualitative study explores the lived experiences and perspectives of senior leaders through interviews with 26 leaders and seven close confidants who provide a nuanced understanding of how senior leaders experience workplace loneliness and offer insight on mitigating these feelings. The findings suggest that the …

A Daca Initiative: Transformative Organizational Change At The School Of Medicine, Cynthia Chaidez

Dissertations

The purpose of this revelatory case study is to explore how the DACA Initiative (DI) transformed the School of Medicine (SOM) beyond just changing student demographics. In this research, I specifically explored if, through the DI, SOM organizationally changed enough to be considered transformative change in its efforts to enhance the acceptance and support of DACA medical students. In addition, I looked at the evolution of the financial operations at SOM to support DACA medical students. The research questions that guided this study were: As a result of the DI, did the organizational changes implemented by SOM to accept and …

Resilience And Associated Factors In Pediatric Nurses, Benjamin M. White

Dissertations

The purpose of this dissertation was to explore pediatric nurse resilience and the contextual factors surrounding it, and propose a heuristic framework of pediatric nurse resilience. A convergent mixed-methods approach to secondary analysis was utilized and the resulting findings informed the heuristic framework.

Perceived Factors Impacting Teachers’ Pedagogical Decision-Making Pertaining To The Use Of Pbl In The Classroom: A Dissertation, Amanda Slaughter

Dissertations

There is a consistent body of research evidence citing the potential of Problem-Based Learning (PBL) as a viable instructional tool to raise student engagement with challenging content (Saye & Brush, 2017; Strutchens and Martin, 2017; Wynn, 2015). According to the National Council for the Social Studies, “The primary purpose of social studies is to help young people develop the ability to make informed and reasoned decisions for the public good as citizens of a culturally diverse, democratic society in an interdependent world” (NCSS, accessed 2023, March 1, para. 2). Scholars like Engle (1960) called for instructional strategies that raised the …