Digital Commons Network^™

Mental Health, Personality, Identity, And Adjusting To Life After Sports, Jovana Babic

Master's Theses

This study looked at how athletes adapt to life after competitive sports in relation to psychological issues. In publicly accessible podcast interviews, 95 former athletes, most competing at the collegiate or professional level, were examined using their own words. Claude and Gemini, two large multimodal models, independently coded each interview for four mental health outcomes: depression, anxiety, dependency, and identity confusion, as well as for a set of predictor variables, such as neuroticism, emotion regulation, athletic identity, identity foreclosure, intrinsic motivation, grit, social support, and retirement planning. A binary present or absence coding system was employed, and Gwet's AC1 was …

Enso-Induced Oceanographic Anomalies And Their Potential Impacts On Coral Species In The Phoenix Islands Protected Area, Jason T. Gonsalves

Master's Theses

The 2015/16 El Niño event is one of the strongest El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) events on record. Coral reefs in the Phoenix Islands Protected Area (PIPA) were exposed to the effects of the 2015/16 El Niño event and experienced moderate to severe coral bleaching and mortality. This study examines the variability in three key oceanographic variables before, during, and after the 2015/16 El Niño event within PIPA: sea surface temperature (SST), sea surface salinity (SSS), and estimated chlorophyll-a (chl-a) as a proxy for regional productivity. I used remote sensing data for SST, SSS, and estimated chl-a coupled with in-situ …

Perspectives Of Trauma Among Licensed Trauma Therapists: A Concept Mapping Study, Sean W. Bullock

Master's Theses

To address gaps between research and psychotherapeutic intervention for trauma and trauma-related issues, the current study elicited and analyzed the perspectives of licensed trauma therapists via a concept mapping process. A literature review was conducted to explore the history and limitations of trauma’s current medical use as outlined by Criterion A of posttraumatic stress disorder in the DSM-5-TR. To answer the research question regarding how practitioners understand trauma, the researcher recruited licensed trauma therapists (n = 17) to participate in concept mapping. Participants generated 126 unique statements, which they then sorted based on similarity and rated individually on importance. Hierarchical …

Fear, Threat, And Google Searches: Examining Ideological Shifts Using Big Data, Erin M. Cerasaro

Master's Theses

In their review of research on factors that affect political conservatism, Jost et al. brought together research from several theoretical viewpoints. This produced a model of psychological needs and motives in individuals which react with stimuli that make them feel fearful and threatened (F/T), increasing adherence to conservative ideology. While some research supports these claims, evidence shows that in some contexts these variables increase ideological polarization overall, but may also have a greater impact on conservative attitudes specifically. Researchers have had difficulty in investigating these relationships in naturalistic settings due to an inability to manipulate events that precipitate this ideological …

Cultural Orientation, Parent-Child Connectedness, And Student Mental Health Perceptions, Abigail M. Mattias

Master's Theses

An individual’s perception of mental health is likely shaped by multiple interrelated factors. Connecting research into mental health perceptions across racial groups and parental value transmission suggests that a strong parent-child relationship increases the likelihood of the child endorsing parental and cultural values. The current survey examined the following predictors of mental health stigma among 144 college students: cultural orientation (collectivist/individualist attitudes), cultural background (collectivist/individualist heritage) as mediated by perceived parental mental health stigma, and parent-child connectedness as moderating the mediation. As predicted, there were stronger links between parent and child mental health stigma when parent-child connectedness was stronger. The …

Knowledge-Enhanced Feature Store For Operational Ml And Llm Workflows, Saurabh Suman

Master's Theses

Modern machine learning (ML) organizations rely on feature stores to manage training and production data, yet as catalogs grow to thousands of features, semantic management becomes the bottleneck: discovery, governance, and metric selection remain largely manual. This thesis proposes and evaluates a knowledge-enhanced feature store that augments a dual-plane store with a hybrid knowledge layer—relational provenance, a lineage graph, semantic vector retrieval, and an online cache—and an LLM-driven multi-agent layer for profiling, matching, grounded metric recommendation, and pipeline generation. A working prototype was evaluated across three task families—semantic profiling, feature-matching retrieval, and discovery—using classification, ranking, and operational metrics computed by …

Empathy As Activism: Empathy Fostering Tactics Of Minoritized Contemporary Artists, Nicole J. Rudolph-Vallerga

Master's Theses

In the 1980s to 1990s, movements emerged such as the U.S Multiculturalism Movement which responded to the Reagan era’s (1981-1989) conservate wave in the United States. Alongside these movements, many artists of minoritized identities (BIPOC, LGBTQIA+, women, disabled, etc.) were under attack and made art designed to inspire an empathetic response in the viewer as a form of defensive activism. These artists created art designed to protect themselves and their marginalized communities by provoking an empathetic connection between the viewer and the artist’s minoritized community to combat internalized stereotypes. I apply Heidi Maibom’s theory of “moral imagination” to activist art …

The Ecological Impacts Of Un-Protecting Forests: The Case Of Gold Mining In Ghana, Tate Alexander Barend

Master's Theses

This paper estimates the causal effect of Ghana’s Legislative Instrument 2462 (L.I. 2462) on deforestation in protected areas. The policy redefined the regulatory regime governing small-scale gold mining in protected areas, moving from prohibition to discretionary permitting. I exploit the implementation of L.I. 2462 as a policy shock and apply a difference-in-differences event-study framework to a propensity score–matched sample of pixels derived from high-resolution satellite images. Contrary to widespread concerns that the policy would accelerate deforestation, the results provide no evidence of large-scale vegetation loss in exposed protected areas following the policy change. Instead, protected area pixels located within 5 …

Baseline Nutrition Knowledge And Feasibility Of A Whatsapp-Delivered Nutrition Education Intervention Among California Wildland-Urban Interface Firefighters, Lauren E. Anderson

Master's Theses

Wildland firefighters perform physically demanding work under challenging environmental conditions that place substantial demands on nutritional health and occupational performance. Despite the importance of nutrition in supporting physical performance, recovery, and long-term health, limited research has examined nutrition knowledge and dietary behaviors among California wildland firefighters or evaluated the feasibility of remotely delivered nutrition education interventions within this occupational population. Therefore, the purpose of this pilot study was to assess baseline nutrition knowledge, nutrition self-efficacy, and dietary behaviors while evaluating the feasibility of a 12-week WhatsApp-delivered nutrition education intervention among California wildland firefighters.

Twenty-four firefighters completed the baseline assessment and …

State Medicaid Expansion And Mental Health In The Poorest States: Examining Differences In States That Expanded Medicaid Compared To Those Which Did Not, Steven Kyle Yates

Master's Theses

Medicaid expansion is a contentious issue in U. S. political debates, especially regarding its impact on public health outcomes. The Republican Party often shows hesitation to support government funding initiatives, citing concerns about creating dependency on entitlement programs like Medicaid. As a result, state legislatures have significant authority to shape their Medicaid programs, including setting eligibility requirements and defining the scope of benefits and services. In this study, I examine disparities in mental health indicators between economically disadvantaged states that expanded Medicaid and those that did not expand Medicaid. The dependent variables include medical costs, measured by how often individuals …

A Genetic Analysis Of The Rare Endemic Astragalus Ripleyi Barneby, Juan Antonio Jaramillo-Chico

Master's Theses

Astragalus ripleyi Barneby is a rare endemic species found in the San Luis Valley of the southern portions of the Rocky Mountains in Colorado and New Mexico. Though not federally listed as endangered, the species is on the Bureau of Land Management’s Sensitive Species List, warranting protection and continued management. This study aims to provide information about the genetic health of the species to inform conservation efforts and provide updated management recommendations. A genetic health analysis was conducted investigating the levels of diversity present in the species, how genetic diversity is structured across the known range of the species and …

Fish Meal Serum Modulates Mitochondrial Membrane Potential In Steroidogenic Cells: Implications For Luteoprotection In Cattle, Tyra Marie Goodluck

Master's Theses

The bovine corpus luteum (CL) is a transient endocrine gland that forms after ovulation and produces progesterone, a hormone crucial for early pregnancy. The cattle industry faces tremendous losses annually due to early embryonic mortality within the first 100 days of gestation, where approximately 16% occur during a critical timeframe known as the maternal recognition of pregnancy (MRP). In a normal estrous cycle, if no viable embryo is present, the uterus secretes prostaglandin F2α (PGF2α) during the late luteal phase, triggering luteal regression. One key action of PGF2α is reducing luteal blood flow, leading to hypoxia. This hypoxic state induces …

The Acute Effect Of A Single Dose Of Berberine On Blood Glucose Response Following A Standardized Meal And 2-Mile Walk Performance In Healthy Adults, Victor Emmanuel Obaro

Master's Theses

It is clear that exercise improves overall health status, and it is possible that berberine (BR) may work through some similar mechanisms to improve health status as well.  Purpose: The purpose of this study was to explore the acute effects of a single dose of BR on health status following a standardized meal and a 2 mile walk treadmill protocol with outcomes including blood glucose (BG), blood pressure (BP), heart rate (HR), rate of perceived exertion (RPE), and a two-mile walk time trial performance. Methods: This study used a cross-over design where 14 healthy, young adults were given berberine (BBR) …

Differential Effects Of Generative Artificial Intelligence On Formative And Summative Assessment Performance: A Quasi-Experimental Longitudinal Study, Md Istiak Morsalin

Master's Theses

Generative artificial intelligence has unsettled a core assumption of course assessment: that scores on unsupervised work reflect what students can do unassisted. This study tests whether the widespread availability of ChatGPT altered student performance differently on formative versus summative assessments in Business Analytics and Foundations, a required undergraduate quantitative-methods course taught by one instructor across nine cohorts. In a quasi-experimental longitudinal design, the Fall~2022 cohort ($n = 90$), the last to finish before ChatGPT's public release, serves as a control against eight post-ChatGPT cohorts spanning Spring~2023 through Summer~2025 ($N = 646$). Outcomes were drawn from McGraw-Hill Connect records using matched …

Determining The Role Of Maumee River Sediments In Microbial Nitrogen Transformations And Net Fluxes, Ashlyn Stanalonis

Master's Theses

The Maumee River watershed is the largest of any river feeding into the Laurentian Great Lakes and is primarily comprised of agricultural land uses. Most cultivated crops require fertilizer applications to sustain growth and productivity. Fertilizer runoff is a major source of nutrient loading to the river, and total nitrogen (N) and phosphorus (P) inputs contribute to eutrophication and cyanobacterial blooms in the western basin of Lake Erie. This study aimed to characterize Maumee River sediments as net N sinks or sources to the western basin and evaluate N removal efficiency (a valuable ecosystem service) to determine if river sediments …

Multidimensional Determinants Of Gait, Balance, And Softball Performance In Female Youth: Biomechanics, Resource Access, And Psychosocial Factors, Allie G. Mcauliffe

Master's Theses

Movement quality is a fundamental indicator of healthy childhood development and supports physical, emotional, psychosocial, and cognitive well-being. Movement quality is influenced by multiple biomechanical, environmental, and psychosocial factors, yet the relationships among them remain poorly understood in underrepresented populations such as female youth, particularly in softball. Previous studies have largely examined biomechanics, resource access, and psychosocial experience independently, and few have investigated how these factors interact in female youth softball players. To address this gap, this study compared gait and balance characteristics between softball (N = 34) and non-softball (N = 7) female youth, examined associations between resource access, …

Id-More Vision: Real-Data Machine-Learning Assessment For A Digital-Twin-Inspired, Xr-Ready Rehabilitation Prototype, Rickey L. Clark

Master's Theses

Rehabilitation assessment often relies on periodic observation, while many XR prototypes show scripted rather than recorded-motion evidence. iD-MORE Vision is an offline pipeline trained on KIMORE and IRDS and linked through JSON packets to a two-mode Unity desktop prototype. Both datasets include controls and rehabilitation participants with neurologic, musculoskeletal, or mobility impairments. This improves relevance but does not clinically validate the system.

Under fixed subject-wise splits, the primary five-seed Random Forest predicted KIMORE clinician scores with MAE 6.087 ± 0.044 cTS and R² 0.568 ± 0.006; the subject-level R² interval crossed zero. The primary IRDS five-run CUDA GRU averaged 0.877 …

Developing A Rapid Urban Forest Assessment System For Sustainable City Greenification, Daniel Gonzalez

Master's Theses

This thesis presents the Rapid Urban Forest Assessment (RUFA) system, a web-based platform that integrates urban tree inventories and aerial tree detection to assess forest health across California’s census-designated places. RUFA combines inventoried tree records with coordinates detected from high-resolution multispectral imagery using convolutional neural networks, then computes a composite RUFA Score from four metrics: canopy cover percentage, trees per capita, tree diversity (TD-50), and tree evenness. The thesis addresses two engineering challenges in building the dashboard: querying and aggregating over seven million tree records in real time, and rendering spatial summaries at multiple zoom levels without recomputing cluster assignments …

Low-Cost Modular Transradial Prosthetic System, Caleb E. Barajas

Master's Theses

Upper-limb loss can significantly impact overall quality of life by limiting  a person's ability to perform activities of daily living (ADLs). Although prosthetic devices can help bridge the gap, many upper-limb prostheses are limited by high costs, discomfort, limited repairability, and accessibility barriers. Current commercial myoelectric prosthetic hands can provide high levels of functionality, but are often expensive and require specialized clinical access. In contrast, many current low-cost and open source prosthetic devices improve affordability but are limited in function or designed for partial hand applications rather than full transradial limb loss.

The purpose of this thesis was to design, …

Beyond Beliefs: Factors That Shape Agricultural Plastic End-Of-Life Management Among California Strawberry Growers, Kyle Y. Cahitas

Master's Theses

The practice of using plastics in agriculture is so prevalent it has earned its own name: plasticulture. One key plasticulture tool is polyethylene (PE) mulch film, a thin plastic sheet laid over the field for a single growing season and pulled out before the next. Because PE film is hard to recycle, most of it ends up in a landfill, yet how growers decide what happens to used plastic mulch has rarely been studied. To identify what shapes that decision, this study draws on a survey of California strawberry growers (n = 126). Twenty variables, spanning grower attitudes, farm characteristics, …

Synthesis And Characterization Of Carbon Quantum Dots And Gold Nanoparticles For Norovirus Biosensing Applications In Water Systems, Breanne Evans

Master's Theses

Rapid, reliable detection of viral pathogens remains a significant challenge across water-treatment and environmental monitoring systems, including drinking-water, wastewater, water reuse, and environmental surveillance applications. Waterborne viral contamination can pose substantial public-health risks, making early detection essential for protecting water quality and responding quickly to treatment failures or contamination events. Direct potable reuse (DPR) is one particularly demanding example because it requires continuous verification of treatment performance and the broader need for rapid virus monitoring extends across many water-treatment and environmental surveillance applications. Norovirus is a priority target because of its widespread occurrence in wastewater, environmental persistence, and exceptionally low …

Federated Learning For Early Medical Diagnosis: Enhanced Diabetic Retinopathy Detection In Smart Healthcare, Mohammad Nasajpour Esfahani

Master's Theses

This thesis investigates the role of federated learning as a privacy-preserving solution for modern healthcare challenges. In traditional machine learning, sensitive medical data must be centralized for model training, raising concerns about privacy, security, and regulatory compliance. Federated learning offers an alternative by allowing hospitals, clinics, and personal health devices to collaboratively train shared models without exchanging raw patient data. The study first explores how federated learning is being used across various healthcare domains, including cancer detection, medical imaging, and disease prediction— highlighting its potential to support secure collaboration across institutions. It addresses key benefits such as data privacy, scalability, …

Secure And Compassionate Dementia Care: Non-Intrusive Remote Monitoring Of Falls, Wandering, And Agitation, Awan-Ur- Rahman

Master's Theses

Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias (ADRD) present significant safety challenges, as affected individuals may experience falls, wandering, agitation, and a progressive decline in independence. Although continuous monitoring can enable timely intervention, many existing systems rely on cameras or wearable devices, which may introduce concerns related to privacy, comfort, and sustained use. This thesis explores privacy-preserving and non-intrusive remote monitoring through two complementary studies. The first study presents an ambient Wi-Fi channel state information framework for recognizing agitation and eight daily activities. The proposed approach translates behavioral and physiological markers commonly captured by wearable sensors into the Wi-Fi sensing domain. The …

Timelines Over Tokens: Summarization, Prompting, And Explainable Fine-Tuning For User-Level Suicide Risk Detection, Aditya Tekale

Master's Theses

This research presents a two-stage pipeline for user-level suicide risk detection from Reddit: first, inference-only prompting with summarization; second, fine-tuned encoder classification with explainability and expert validation. The data are user-level: each of the 500 C-SSRS Reddit items is one user’s chronologically concatenated posts and comments (a user timeline), annotated by psychiatrists. Stage one: six prompting strategies zero-shot, few-shot, chain-of-thought, tree-of-thought, least-to-most, and self-consistency are evaluated across six LLMs on multi-class and binary formulations; simple zero-shot achieves the highest balanced accuracy (0.53 multi-class). Error analysis shows longer inputs associate with misclassification (p = 0.002); domain-specific summarization (timelines >2,000 tokens) reduces …

The Relationship Between Strength Training And Burnout, Maddie R. Barrientos

Master's Theses

The purpose of this study was to comprehensively examine the relationship between strength training and burnout to assess whether consistent engagement in strength training would be associated with lower levels of burnout. Results of an online survey administered to 119 participants revealed that those who did strength train versus those who did not did not significantly differ in their levels of burnout, but among those who did strength training, there were significant differences in levels of burnout with how they engaged in strength training. The greater frequency of strength training participation and the greater number of muscle groups trained were …

Impacts Of Agricultural Microplastics On The Growth Of Marine Phytoplankton In Monterey Bay, Olivia A. Pawlyk

Master's Theses

Agricultural plastics are an emerging source of microplastics (MPs) to coastal marine environments, yet their effects on marine phytoplankton remain poorly understood. In coastal regions surrounding Monterey Bay (California, USA), plastic mulch used in agriculture can fragment into MPs during weathering and removal, entering marine waters via runoff and wind transport. This study investigated the effects of environmentally relevant concentrations of agricultural MPs on the growth and physiology of four marine phytoplankton species: two harmful algal bloom (HAB) taxa (Alexandrium sp. and Pseudo-nitzschia multiseries) and two non-HAB taxa (Thalassiosira sp. and Prorocentrum sp.). Each species was cultured independently and exposed …

Depth-Dependent Effects Of Disturbance On Reproductive Output And Growth Of Giant Kelp (Macrocystis Pyrifera), Roxanne-Alexa Amalia Garibay

Master's Theses

Understanding the resilience of foundation species to disturbance, such as the canopy-forming giant kelp (Macrocystis pyrifera), is crucial as these species support diverse communities by provisioning habitat and nutrients. This study investigated sublethal effects of biomass loss on reproductive traits and the recovery of vegetative biomass following simulated disturbance at shallow and deep sites in Stillwater Cove, central California. Initial baseline morphometrics revealed that depth significantly influenced total frond length and blade density but did not predict other vegetative or reproductive biomass metrics. A manipulative experiment varying type and intensity of disturbance—from canopy removal to full frond culls—demonstrated a decoupled …

Biologically-Based Alternatives To Plastic Mulch Enrich Microbiome And Buffer Yield In Small-Scale Strawberry Production, Olivia L. Fragiacomo

Master's Theses

Much of commercial agriculture has used plastic mulch since the 1950s to contain fungicides and fertilizers, control weeds, retain soil moisture, and warm the top soil to start the growing season earlier. Research suggests that small-scale strawberry (Fragaria x ananassa) growers may be able to incorporate biological techniques, such as wheat straw mulch with microbial amendments, to reduce the use of single-use plastic mulch with a comparable yield. For this study, I carried out a randomized complete block comparison of five strawberry management techniques: plastic mulch (PM), straw mulch alone, and straw mulch inoculated with either arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi (AMF), …

Investigating Learning In Immersive Virtual Reality, Andrew Negrette

Master's Theses

Students often struggle with learning challenging subjects throughout their education. This also tends to lead to lower enjoyment and science self-efficacy for learning. Some subjects may be better represented in 3-dimensional spaces utilizing immersive virtual reality (IVR). Recently, IVR headsets have become more accessible and affordable and therefore are in wider use. The purpose of this study was to investigate whether differences in science selfefficacy, enjoyment, presence and knowledge retention exist between IVR and controls on an ocean acidification lesson. I predicted that participants taking the lesson in IVR would score higher compared to a laptop on all measures, due …

Spatial Heterogeneity And Temporal Trends Of California Extreme Heat Using High-Resolution Earth System Model Simulations, Eleni Konstantelos

Master's Theses

Extreme heat threatens California’s diverse landscapes and populations through intensifying and geographically shifting patterns. This study examined the temporal trend and spatial heterogeneities of California’s extreme heat for 1994–2015. The analysis was based on the fully coupled Energy Exascale Earth System Model version 2 (E3SMv2), specifically its 25-km regionally refined configuration. While the Desert/Inland region exhibited the highest number of days ≥ 35 °C and the highest heatwave severity, Central Valley showed the fastest increase in the number of days ≥ 35 °C and heatwave events, as well as the fastest increases of days exceeding various heat index thresholds over …