Digital Commons Network^™

An Attachment-Based Group Intervention, Shannon Dillon

Doctoral Dissertations

This mixed method study aimed to understand and describe the effectiveness of an intervention and the experiences of mothers raising their children in a transitional living home. This was achieved through interviewing four mothers in Gilead House. Initially, participants completed the Depression, Anxiety and Stress scale (DASS-21), the Trauma History Screening (THS), the Adolescent Adult Parenting Inventory-2 (AAPI-2) and a demographics form. The first interview was also completed. Interview questions were based on the Working Model of the Child Interview (WCMI). Following this time 1 meeting an attachment-based group intervention was utilized for eight weeks. This intervention was based on …

Exploring The Impact Of Involuntary Job Loss And Unemployment On Meaning Violation And Spiritual Struggle, Ian A. Gutierrez

Doctoral Dissertations

Psychological theory on unemployment has posited that involuntary job loss violates a person’s sense of meaning, but few studies have directly tested this proposition. Moreover, research has yet to explore whether involuntary job loss is associated with religious or spiritual struggles, such as blaming God for one’s circumstances, doubting one’s religious belief, or grappling with one’s understanding of meaning in life. The present study followed unemployed persons (N = 162) who had recently lost employment involuntary at three time points over a period of two months to examine (1) the relationships between religious and spiritual struggles and mental health …

Electroconductive Nanofiber Matrices For Muscle Regeneration, Xiaoyan Tang

Doctoral Dissertations

The treatment of rotator cuff tears of the shoulder is one the most common and challenging orthopedic problems. Tendon tears not only lead to pain but can also cause tendon thinning and retraction, fatty expansion and muscle atrophy. This subsequently can result in loss of shoulder stability and function. Clinically, surgical repair of tendons is performed to restore the connection between bone, tendon, and muscle. However, even after surgical repair, compromised tendon healing can be observed mainly due to fatty expansion into adjacent muscles. Preventing adjacent muscle degeneration and addressing fatty expansion is therefore critical to achieving favorable clinical outcomes …

Thermal, Electrical, And Electrochemical Characterizations Of Advanced Nanomaterials For Energy Conversion And Storage Applications, Sajad Yazdani

Doctoral Dissertations

Archival abstract submitted

Exploring Targets Of Transcription Factors In Cancer Signaling Pathways, Tham Hong Hoang

Doctoral Dissertations

Recent studies have suggested a key role of activities related to target genes of transcription factors (TFs) in cancer signaling pathways. Molecular pathway curation includes mostly upstream signals which are well-established in the literature, but the activities that are downstream of TFs are not well understood. The purpose of this thesis is to design a computational method for exploring TF target genes in a given molecular pathway. We then use this data to stratify patients and relate TF activity to patient survival.

Transcriptome data can provide a detailed readout of events taking place within a cancer, but new computational tools …

Advances In Smart Structure Technologies For Civil Infrastructure, Sergio Lobo-Aguilar

Doctoral Dissertations

Smart civil engineering structures incorporate electronic devices to generate information that can be used for enhancing their own performance and/or the performance of other related systems. Three main components can be typically integrated with a structural system in order to generate a smart structure: sensing and sensor networks, data processing and decision-making, and actuation and control. This dissertation contributes to the state of the art of smart structural technologies for civil infrastructure through investigations on each one of these areas. For the area of sensing and sensor networks, fieldwork on structural health monitoring (SHM) was performed. In particular, it was …

Efficient Algorithms For Trees And Networks In Evolutionary Genomics, Sajad Mirzaei

Doctoral Dissertations

Phylogenetic networks are graphs used to abstractly or explicitly visualize the evolutionary relationships between genes, genomes, species, nucleotide sequences, chromosomes, etc. Reticulation events such as hybridization, horizontal gene transfer, recombination, population admixture, gene duplication, etc. are shown in such networks. Phylogenetic trees are a subset of phylogenetic networks used in the absence of such events.

In this dissertation, we focus on some of the existing problems in phylogenetics.

First, we propose a heuristic method called PIRN_S to build near optimal so-called ``hybridization networks" from a given set of phylogenetic trees (called gene trees), representing evolutionary history, such that trees are …

Oxford Nanopore Technology: A Promising Long-Read Sequencing Platform To Study Exon Connectivity And Characterize Isoforms Of Complex Genes, Gopinath Rajadinakaran

Doctoral Dissertations

The central dogma states that the genetic information contained in DNA flows to RNA through the process of transcription which, in turn, can result in protein synthesis through translation. Alternative splicing is a mechanism by which multiple mRNA isoforms are generated from a single gene. Ultracomplex genes, characterized by their ability to encode hundreds to thousands of isoforms, arise from a combination of multiple splicing events. Our understanding of alternative splicing improved vastly in the past decade due to the advent of next-generation sequencing (NGS) technologies. The NGS technologies are powerful and have enabled scientists to measure the expression of …

Computational Study On Ferroelectricity In Hafnia And Other Binary Oxides, Rohit Batra

Doctoral Dissertations

Archival abstract submitted

The Development And Mechanistic Investigations Of Various Catalytic Processes By Mesoporous Metal Oxides And Sulfides, Biswanath Dutta

Doctoral Dissertations

This thesis includes five chapters. The 1^st Chapter provides a brief introduction of mesoporous materials and heterogeneous catalysis. Chapter 2 describes the coupling of anilines to azo dyes in the presence of mesoporous manganese oxide materials. In Chapter 3 an extension of the applicability of mesoporous manganese oxide catalysts to cross dehydrogenative coupling of N-Aryltetrahydroisoquinolines (sp³ C-H) with indoles (sp² C-H) is discussed. Moreover, in Chapter 4 the applicability of mesoporous cobalt sulfoselenide system was studied for producing hydrogen from water under electro-catalytic conditions. Finally, in Chapter 5, the future perspectives of the development of mesoporous …

A Framework For Secure And Interoperable Cloud Computing With Rbac, Mac, And Dac, Mohammed Shaya Baihan

Doctoral Dissertations

Cloud computing has emerged as a de facto approach throughout society, commercial and government sectors, and research/academic communities. In the last decade, many organizations have considered outsourcing their IT service to the cloud where the services would have better availability and quality. However, this requires mobile and desktop clients for different stakeholders, in a domain such as healthcare, to obtain information from multiple systems, that may be: operating with different paradigms (e.g., cloud services, programming services, web services); utilize alternate cloud service providers; and, employ diverse security/access control techniques. This raises two main problems: services integration and security policies integration …

Methods And Algorithms For Inference Problems In Population Genetics, Jingwen Pei

Doctoral Dissertations

Inference of population history is a central problem of population genetics. The advent of large genetic data brings us not only opportunities on developing more accurate methods for inference problems, but also computational challenges. Thus, we aim at developing accurate method and fast algorithm for problems in population genetics.

Inference of admixture proportions is a classical statistical problem. We particularly focus on the problem of ancestry inference for ancestors. Standard methods implicitly assume that both parents of an individual have the same admixture fraction. However, this is rarely the case in real data. We develop a Hidden Markov Model (HMM) …

Stability Of Lialo2 In Molten Carbonate Fuel Cell: Mechanism Of Particle Coarsening And Phase Transformation, Su Jeong Heo

Doctoral Dissertations

Archival abstract submitted

System Modeling, Performance Evaluation, And Control Of Battery System Charge Balance, Weiji Han

Doctoral Dissertations

As the major energy storage device and power supply source in numerous energy applications, battery systems often face the issue of charge imbalance among battery cells/modules/packs, which can accelerate battery degradation, cause more energy loss, and even incur fire hazard. This thesis is focused on the system modeling, performance evaluation, and control of battery systems with various charge balancing circuits. Specifically, based on the proposed mathematical models for battery charge equalization systems, computationally efficient methods are developed to estimate the evolution of battery state of charge and to evaluate critical system performance measures. Then, near-optimal battery cell/module reconfiguration algorithms are …

Greasing The Data Engine: Economic Impact And Legislative Success Of Information And Communication Technologies (Ict) At Local And National Levels, Aindrila Chakraborty

Doctoral Dissertations

Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) form the backbone of today’s technological and economic growth. Advances in ICT enabled technologies can be beneficial to the economic development of different sectors of a society. However, to take full advantage of ICT, availability of high-speed broadband is critical. Infrastructure development to provide high speed connection has huge upfront cost, and therefore posit a significant challenge for local governments, who are the primary decision makers with respect to broadband expansion plans. Scant research is available to measure the impact of broadband speed on local economies. In a related vein, the explosion in broadband speed …

Using Computational Methods And Experimentation To Understand The Persuasiveness Of Vaccine Messages, Zhan Xu

Doctoral Dissertations

In the digital age, true and false information can influence health-related decisions differently. It is important to monitor the dissemination of misinformation, understand public interests and develop persuasive messages. Two studies were conducted in order to meet these goals. Study 1 used computational methods to explore topic evolution and popularity in vaccine-related online messages. Topic modeling identified 14 topics in pro-vaccine messages (PVMs) and 12 topics in anti-vaccine messages (AVMs). PVMs that used personal stories received the highest number of shares, reactions, and comments. Pure scientific knowledge received the least attention. The most frequently appearing topic in AVMs was about …

Statistically Efficient Target Tracking With A Single Stationary Optical Sensor And Measurement Extraction, Qin Lu

Doctoral Dissertations

Target tracking has been under extensive investigation for the past several decades. It has wide applications, such as defense, computer vision, robotics, etc. Optical sensors are widely used in tracking systems. In this dissertation, several issues related to statistically efficient target tracking with a single stationary optical sensor will be explored. The first part of the dissertation is {\it ``The Multidimensional Cramer-Rao-Leibniz Lower Bound for Likelihood Functions with Parameter-Dependent Support"}. This work derived the multidimensional Cram\'{e}r-Rao-Leibniz lower bound (CRLLB), which is a generalization of the Cram\'{e}r-Rao lower bound (CRLB) when the likelihood function (LF) has parameter-dependent support and it is …

Phylogeny, Taxonomy, And The Concept Of Lineage In The Presence Of Horizontal Gene Transfer, Matthew Fullmer

Doctoral Dissertations

Whole genome sequencing has opened enormous worlds of opportunity in recent years as the number of sequenced organisms has continued to skyrocket. Keeping track of what we have sequenced and added to our databases, as the cornucopia of data grows ever larger, is essential. Maintaining order in our classification of genomes and understanding how they relate to each other is probable to only continue to grow in importance as time progresses. A second major consequence of the explosion in genome sequencing is the ever-increasing opportunity to explore the distribution and role of rare genes in the pan-genomes of phylogenetic groups …

Toward More Efficient Solar Energy Conversion Using Molecularly Anchored Nanocatalysts And Novel Porphyrinoid Dyes, Bowen Yang

Doctoral Dissertations

Archival abstract submitted

Multiscale Modeling Of Perovskite Ferroelectrics: From First Principles To Coarse-Grained Descriptions, Krishna Chaitanya Pitike

Doctoral Dissertations

Ferroelectrics are an important class of materials that exhibit rich functional behavior and are being actively investigated for a variety of technological applications. Multiscale modeling of ferroelectric materials is necessary for accelerating the design and discovery of the next generation of functional materials and nanostructures. In this dissertation, we study the properties of perovskite based ferroelectric systems with the help of first principles calculations, as well as use the results of these calculations to develop coarse-grained descriptions of ferroelectric behavior. In particular we elucidate the electronic underpinnings of functional behavior arising from polarization rotations in classical and layered perovskite oxides …

Advanced Chemistry Solver Development And Computational Diagnostics And Dynamic Adaptive Modeling Of Turbulent Combustion, Chao Xu

Doctoral Dissertations

Three approaches toward efficient and predictive turbulent combustion modeling are investigated in this dissertation. The first approach focuses on the development of locally reduced chemistry and advanced solvers for efficient time integration of stiff chemical kinetic systems. In particular, a numerical technique using dynamic adaptive chemistry (DAC) with splitting schemes is developed and demonstrated in one-dimensional (1-D) premixed flames. A sparse stiff chemistry solver based on dynamic adaptive hybrid integration (AHI) and sparse matrix techniques (AHI-S), and an iterative uncoupled quasi-steady-state (IU-QSS) method for improved stability of explicit solvers, are further developed and shown to be more computationally efficient than …

Automatic Document Summarization Using Knowledge Based System, Andrey Timofeyev

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation describes a knowledge-based system to create abstractive summaries of documents by generalizing new concepts, detecting main topics and creating new sentences. The proposed system is built on the Cyc development platform that consists of the world’s largest knowledge base and one of the most powerful inference engines. The system is unsupervised and domain independent. Its domain knowledge is provided by the comprehensive ontology of common sense knowledge contained in the Cyc knowledge base. The system described in this dissertation generates coherent and topically related new sentences as a summary for a given document. It uses syntactic structure and …

Mutual Information In The Frequency Domain For Application In Biological Systems, Rui Liu

Doctoral Dissertations

Biological systems are comprised of multiple components that typically interact nonlinearly and produce multiple outputs (time series/signals) with specific frequency characteristics. Although the exact knowledge of the underlying mechanism remains unknown, the outputs observed from these systems can provide the dependency relations through quantitative methods and increase our understanding of the original systems. The nonlinear relations at specific frequencies require advanced dependency measures to capture the generalized interactions beyond typical correlation in the time domain or coherence in the frequency domain. Mutual information from Information Theory is such a quantity that can measure statistical dependency between random variables. Herein, we …

Synthesis Of Alpha-Galactosylceramide Analogs For Th1 Biased Inkt Cell Activation And Novel Reactions With Ketiminium Salts, Nicole Sassu

Doctoral Dissertations

Natural killer T (NKT) cells are a subset of T cells that recognizes and is activated by glycolipid antigens. Glycolipids, specifically alpha-galactosylceramides, are a primary focus due to their ability to modulate immune responses based on interactions with NKT cells. KRN7000, the first synthetic glycolipid shown to potently activate NKT cells, has been the foundation of structure-activity relationship (SAR) studies, providing insight to how glycolipids interact with components of the immune system to elicit specific responses. A glycolipid can produce a Th1 and/or Th2 response from NKT cells. A primary goal of many researchers is to produce a potent glycolipid, …

Analyzing The Role Of Gibberellin In Dwarfism And Shade Tolerance In Perennial Ryegrass (Lolium Perenne, L.) As Exhibited By The Shadow-1 Mutant Lineage, Lorenzo Katin-Grazzini

Doctoral Dissertations

Turfgrass is cultivated across the globe as an aesthetically pleasing and functional groundcover. One of the most popular turfgrass species is perennial ryegrass (Lolium perenne L.), which is valued for its fast establishment, dark green color, and adaptability to different soil types. In 2011, the Li lab initiated a mutation breeding program focused on developing new perennial ryegrass cultivars with desirable traits for the turfgrass industry. This project first centered around identifying dwarf mutant plants and later evolved into an exploration of beneficial secondary phenotypes associated with dwarfism, such as shade tolerance. One mutant, called shadow-1, was analyzed …

Fault Detection, Diagnosis And Prognosis In Hvac Air Handling Systems, Ying Yan

Doctoral Dissertations

As key sub-systems of HVACs, air handling systems are used to condition air to satisfy human thermal comfort and air quality requirements. Fault diagnosis is critical since it allows system operators to know which faults have occurred, how critical they are, and improve the system availability. Additionally, fault prognosis is critical since it allows system operators to know Remaining Useful lives of systems and their components, and prevents unexpected breakdowns. However, fault diagnosis of known and new fault types and fault prognosis are complex since 1) fault propagation across components is hard to capture; 2) measurement noise cause many false …

Water And Anion Transport In Electrochemical Devices, Travis Omasta

Doctoral Dissertations

In this thesis, the balance and transport of water, hydroxide, and carbonates in Anion Exchange Membrane Fuel Cells (AEMFCs) are investigated. First, macro-scale water is examined, and the need for high membrane conductivity, a predictor of water back diffusion, is demonstrated by operating at lower relative humidities to avoid catalyst layer flooding. Additionally, the distribution of water in the membrane, electrodes, and gas diffusion layers was directly imaged with neutron radiography in an operando fuel cell. The insight from the neutron images was combined with electrode diagnostics evaluating the kinetic, ohmic, and mass transport limitations of the cell, resulting in …

Cardiovascular Biometrics To Secure The Internet Of Things, Nima Karimianbahnemiri

Doctoral Dissertations

IoT wearables and mobile devices have the potential to dramatically lower healthcare costs through remote health monitoring but come with risks of fraud due to the lack of physical presence at the time of collection. Many of the problems are related to access control and can be at least partially alleviated by incorporating biometric authentication.

Biometrics have several benefits. First, they are more convenient than passwords, thereby preserving the spirit of IoT. Second, if appropriately selected, they could have low probability of circumvention. Third, the incorporation of biometrics into IoT brings concerns of cost and implementing a “user-friendly” design. While …

Traveling Waves In A Suspension Bridge, Rebecca Moran

Doctoral Dissertations

Historical evidence shows that a traveling wave can traverse the length of a suspension bridge. Using a modified model of a beam, traveling wave solutions can be investigated. The model is a partial differential equation governing its deflection in space and time. Finding its traveling wave solutions converts it into an ordinary differential equation. The cables of the suspension bridge lead to a nonlinearity. Solutions of this model have been explored before, but the work is continued by adding an impulse traveling the length of the bridge. Additionally, the stability of the traveling wave solutions is studied.

Study Of Supercontinuum And High Repetition Rate Short Pulse Generation, Xiang Zhang

Doctoral Dissertations

The rapidly increasing data traffic nowadays has benefited a lot from the dramatic progress of optical telecommunications such as dense wavelength division multiplexing (DWDM) and time-division multiplexing (TDM), which employ broadband light source and high-repetition ultrashort optical pulse respectively to carry information in optical fibers. High speed all optical data processing and switching components will also be important in future fiber-optic communication systems since conventional electro-optical parts have reached their bottleneck both speed-wise and efficiency-wise. In this PhD thesis work, I propose a dispersion varying scheme realized by non-uniformly tapering fibers or waveguides to enhance supercontinuum generation. The physical mechanism …