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Social Wellness Of Counselor Education And Supervision Doctoral Students Before, During And After Covid-19, Alexandria Barnette Dec 2023

Social Wellness Of Counselor Education And Supervision Doctoral Students Before, During And After Covid-19, Alexandria Barnette

Doctoral Dissertations

Counselor education and supervision doctoral students (CESDS) comprise a unique population with oftentimes strenuous and competing roles that may impact their social wellness and feelings of connection and support. The arrival and continued presence of the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic also heightened isolation and increased impediments to connection and support for many. Given some of the benefits of social wellness, research on recent CESDS experiences is timely. This two-manuscript dissertation begins with a literature review on the topic and ends with an empirical study to further knowledge on the experience of social wellness that CESDS had during their doctoral programs taking …


Human Milk: From Covid-19 Immunity To Breast Cancer Risk Assessment, Vignesh Narayanaswamy Feb 2023

Human Milk: From Covid-19 Immunity To Breast Cancer Risk Assessment, Vignesh Narayanaswamy

Doctoral Dissertations

Breastmilk is a complex biological fluid containing macromolecules including lipids, oligosaccharides, proteins as well as several types of cells. Several studies have reported in detail of these components. My focus is studying the protein component of breastmilk, specifically antibodies, cytokines, and other secreted factors in the setting of different pathogenicity in women. Studies have demonstrated that the levels of numerous cytokines as well as the levels of pathogen-specific antibodies are altered in milk upon either maternal or infant infections. Additionally, there are reports that the levels of certain inflammatory markers are altered in milk among women with breast cancer or …


Mining Public Opinion On Covid-19 Vaccines Using Unstructured Social Media Data, Chad Aaron Melton Dec 2022

Mining Public Opinion On Covid-19 Vaccines Using Unstructured Social Media Data, Chad Aaron Melton

Doctoral Dissertations

The emergence of the novel coronavirus (COVID-19), and the necessary separation of populations led to an unprecedented number of new social media users seeking information related to the pandemic. Nowadays, with an estimated 4.5 billion users worldwide, social media data offer an opportunity for near real-time analysis of large bodies of text related to disease outbreaks and vaccination. This study investigated and compared public discourse related to COVID-19 vaccines expressed on two popular social media platforms, Reddit and Twitter. Approximately 9.5 million Tweets and 70 thousand Reddit comments were analyzed from dates January 1, 2020, to March 1, 2022, and …


Social Media Analytics With Applications In Disaster Management And Covid-19 Events, Md Yasin Kabir Aug 2022

Social Media Analytics With Applications In Disaster Management And Covid-19 Events, Md Yasin Kabir

Doctoral Dissertations

"Social media such as Twitter offers a tremendous amount of data throughout an event or a disastrous situation. Leveraging social media data during a disaster is beneficial for effective and efficient disaster management. Information extraction, trend identification, and determining public reactions might help in the future disaster or even avert such an event. However, during a disaster situation, a robust system is required that can be deployed faster and process relevant information with satisfactory performance in real-time. This work outlines the research contributions toward developing such an effective system for disaster management, where it is paramount to develop automated machine-enabled …


Design And Development Of The Urban Population Health Observatory To Improve Disease Surveillance And Response, Whitney Brakefield May 2022

Design And Development Of The Urban Population Health Observatory To Improve Disease Surveillance And Response, Whitney Brakefield

Doctoral Dissertations

Chronic and infectious diseases have a profound impact on the quality and length of life of populations that suffer from these conditions. Scientists, physicians, and health officials are seeking innovative approaches to decrease the morbidity and mortality of deadly diseases. Incorporating artificial intelligence and data science techniques across the health science domain could improve disease surveillance, intervention planning, and policymaking. In this dissertation, we describe the design and development of the Urban Population Health Observatory (UPHO), an explainable knowledge-based multimodal big data analytics platform. A common challenge for conducting multimodal big data analytics is integrating multidimensional heterogeneous data sources, which …


Justice Involvement During Covid-19 And The Possibility Of Transitional Justice, Rachel A. Ponder May 2022

Justice Involvement During Covid-19 And The Possibility Of Transitional Justice, Rachel A. Ponder

Doctoral Dissertations

The COVID-19 pandemic introduced numerous unprecedented political, social, and economic challenges that resulted in unprecedented responses by policy makers. As result, existing inequalities and injustices rooted in a dense history of structural and institutional violence were uncovered and exacerbated. As of June 2021, at least 398,627 people in prison tested positive for COVID-19 and at least 2,715 had died (The Marshall Project 2021). In the United States, the inmate population is disproportionately made up of poor, people of color. This is a pattern that is rooted in the country’s long history of racism and white supremacy. This cycle continues as …


Decision-Analytic Models Using Reinforcement Learning To Inform Dynamic Sequential Decisions In Public Policy, Seyedeh Nazanin Khatami Mar 2022

Decision-Analytic Models Using Reinforcement Learning To Inform Dynamic Sequential Decisions In Public Policy, Seyedeh Nazanin Khatami

Doctoral Dissertations

We developed decision-analytic models specifically suited for long-term sequential decision-making in the context of large-scale dynamic stochastic systems, focusing on public policy investment decisions. We found that while machine learning and artificial intelligence algorithms provide the most suitable frameworks for such analyses, multiple challenges arise in its successful adaptation. We address three specific challenges in two public sectors, public health and climate policy, through the following three essays. In Essay I, we developed a reinforcement learning (RL) model to identify optimal sequence of testing and retention-in-care interventions to inform the national strategic plan “Ending the HIV Epidemic in the US”. …


An Exploration Of Learning-At-Home Experiences Among Families And Children Of Color Labeled With Disabilities During Covid-19: A Narrative Inquiry, Nam Ju Han Jan 2022

An Exploration Of Learning-At-Home Experiences Among Families And Children Of Color Labeled With Disabilities During Covid-19: A Narrative Inquiry, Nam Ju Han

Doctoral Dissertations

We are living in this historical moment of a COVID-19 global crisis that is continuing to impact marginalized families in our very own communities. Students of color, especially those who are already on the margins, and experience inequities in the classroom and in the community, have been further impacted by the quarantine as the educational system had not prioritized how to support students who face certain vulnerabilities due to lack of government funding, the historical oppressive tendency for schools to function within a medical model of standardization, along with the commodification of learning. Given the novelty of COVID-19 research, the …


Perseverance: A Focused Ethnographic Study Of The Emergency Triage Nurse, Ellen C. Smithline Jun 2021

Perseverance: A Focused Ethnographic Study Of The Emergency Triage Nurse, Ellen C. Smithline

Doctoral Dissertations

Introduction: The emergency triage process is not meeting the needs of the patient or the healthcare team. Current and past research has focused primarily on the emergency triage nurse’s ability to accurately designate the triage acuity score, while largely ignoring the impacts of the complex and dynamic environment in which they are immersed. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to describe the factors that influence the decision-making process of the emergency triage nurse (ETN). Method: This was a focused ethnographic study that included four phases. Phase 1 was the grand tour of the emergency triage and waiting room area. …