Digital Commons Network^™

Improving The Diet Quality Of Wic-Participating Women Using Digital Food Environments, Yarisbel Melo Herrera

Open Access Dissertations

Maternal diet plays a critical role during the perinatal period, impacting both short- and long-term health outcomes in women and their children. Lower-income individuals are at higher risk of having a low diet quality. Therefore, the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) aims to reduce the negative impacts of low socioeconomic status on the diet of its participants (low-income pregnant and postpartum women and children up to age 5) to promote optimal short- and long-term health outcomes. Numerous studies show that WIC improves children’s diet quality, but associations in women have been insufficiently evaluated. While there …

Data Augmentation For Smart Grid Anomaly Detection, Jennifer Rogers

Open Access Dissertations

The future of power generation and delivery relies on the safe and secure operation of the smart grid. Intelligent devices and networked automation and control make the smart grid cleaner and more efficient to meet society’s ever-changing energy needs. At the same time, the advent of the smart grid introduces new vulnerabilities to this critical infrastructure. The security and resiliency of the smart grid are paramount to national security and will require an approach that leverages traditional network security in addition to domain-specific anomaly detection.

Data-driven anomaly detection has become a prevalent research topic for smart grids in recent years, …

Identification Of Cellulose Synthase Structural Features Involved In Cellulose Synthesis Complex Formation, Jamie Lamkin

Open Access Dissertations

Cellulose is a microfibrillar polysaccharide component of plant cell walls and consists of bundles of β-1,4-linked glucan chains. In addition to being important for plant cell walls, cellulose is also used by humans for a variety of purposes such as biofuels and building materials. Cellulose is produced by the integral plasma membrane enzyme Cellulose Synthase (CESA) and multiple CESA proteins can combine to form a six-lobed rosette structure called a Cellulose Synthesis Complex (CSC). In seed plants CSCs appear to be hetero-oligomeric, comprising three different CESA isoforms. However some non-seed plants, such as the bryophyte Physcomitrium patens, can form …

Designing Accessible Computing Device Authentication For People With Upper Extremity Impairment, Brittany Lewis

Open Access Dissertations

Computing device authentication, the process of proving one's identity to a computing device (e.g., laptop, tablet, smart phone, etc.), is critical to protecting the sensitive data these devices contain. However, computing device authentication often makes assumptions about the user's ability to perform complex tasks with their arms, hands, and fingers. For example, entering complex passwords, or accurately positioning a camera for facial recognition. This can create barriers for people with upper extremity impairment (UEI) who have reduced strength, accuracy, dexterity, speed, and/or range of motion in their shoulders, upper arms, forearms, hands, and/or fingers. My goal is to design new, …

The Outsider Within: The Experiences Of Black Francophone African Students In Higer Education, Safietou Sagna

Open Access Dissertations

The research focuses on Black Francophone African international (BFAI) students in the United States. Research on international students is dominated by studies focused on Asian international students. Moreover, the participants in several major studies related to African international students are primarily from Anglophone countries. As a result, the educational experiences of BFAI students are not adequately represented in the bigger narrative about African international students. This multiple case study centers the voices of four BFAI students (3 men and one woman) to gain a better understanding of the factors that positively and negatively affect their educational journeys. The results of …

How Does The Built Environment Impact Small Business Growth? A Case Study In East Greenwich, Rhode Island, Steven Anthony Campo

Open Access Dissertations

The purpose of this dissertation was to identify practices that ensure decisions about soft infrastructure investments in downtown districts of small-medium sized cities in America have their desired impact on the economy and the community. Many American cities and towns recognize the need to successfully revitalize downtown centers. While there is evidence that soft infrastructure like landscaping, pedestrian walkways, benches, and lighting can impact businesses in downtown districts, investments in soft infrastructure in downtown districts do not always have the desired economic impact. One possible reason for the mixed results is small and medium sized cities may not have formal …

Missing Voices: A Formative Experiment To Improve Dialogue In One Online College Classroom During The Covid-19 Pandemic, P. Kevin Topper

Open Access Dissertations

Students’ voices are all too often missing in classrooms today. Research over the past 50 years has identified a number of problems associated with these missing voices. There are ingrained habits of “initiation-response-evaluation" (I-R-E) during which teachers assume responsibility for guiding classroom conversation and a tendency for many educators to engage in more monologic talk patterns. These classroom talk patterns intersect with several affective factors to significantly impede students’ full and genuine participation in learning. The purpose of this study was to develop and implement an intervention drawn from theories of dialogic pedagogy that I called Facilitated Participant-Centered Discussion (FPCD). …

Biophysical Characterization Of Phlip And Phlip-Cargo Conjugates Developed For Imaging And Therapy, Hannah Visca

Open Access Dissertations

Acidity is considered an alternative biomarker for targeting diseased tissues, such as in the acute phase of inflammation or tumors with poor prognosis. The family of pH Low Insertion Peptides (pHLIPs) are known markers of tissue acidity which provide a useful method for the diagnosis and/or treatment of disease by extracellular or intracellular delivery of imaging agents or therapeutic molecules. In my research, I employ fluorescence and CD spectroscopic techniques to understand how pHLIP's pH-dependent interactions with and insertion into the lipid bilayer of the cell membrane are affected by its sequence and conjugation with cargo and how this correlates …

Femtosecond Time-Resolved Coherent Raman Spectroscopy Of Equilibrium Phonons In Cubic Perovskites, Jeremy Sylvester

Open Access Dissertations

Essential to green energy technologies are new materials for high-power electronics, especially wide-bandgap semiconductors such as Barium Stannate (BSO) and Strontium Titanate (STO) which promise outstanding performance in high power transistor applications. Design and performance of these materials relies on detailed knowledge of basic physical parameters, including charge-carrier mobility. The mobility values can be as high as 500 cm2/Vs for electron concentrations >1x10¹⁹ /cm³ provided that the effect of impurity scattering is reduced using special doping techniques. In this case, the inelastic carrier-phonon scattering is the only mechanism that strongly affects the mobility as the polar optical (LO) …

Race And Sex Assigned At Birth As Moderators Of Harm Reduction Pharmacobehavioral Treatment Outcomes For Alcohol Use Disorder Among People Experiencing Homelessness, Silvi C. Goldstein

Open Access Dissertations

Among populations experiencing homelessness, alcohol use disorder (AUD) precipitates high rates of alcohol-related mortality and morbidity. Within this population, minoritized race, ethnicity, and sex assigned at birth populations experience disproportionate alcohol-related harm. A four-arm randomized control trial (RCT) of Harm Reduction Treatment with Pharmacotherapy (HaRP) tested the efficacy of harm reduction treatment with extended-release naltrexone (XR-NTX; VIVITROL®) among urban-dwelling adults experiencing homelessness and AUD. The HaRP study included three treatment arms (harm reduction counseling [HRC], XR-NTX + HRC, Placebo + HRC) and a services-as-usual control group. The present secondary study 1) used a mixed methods approach to assess perceptions and …

Executive Functioning Interventions For Individuals With Adhd: A Systematic Review, Lauren Thompson

Open Access Dissertations

Ongoing research regarding interventions for executive functions (EFs), the top-down cognitive processes that guide planning and decision-making behaviors, aims to determine whether intervention programs result in significant improvements in EFs for both neurotypical and neurodivergent populations (Diamond & Ling, 2016). EFs are critical because they predict performance in other daily living domains, including physical health, quality of life, and job performance (Cristofori et al., 2019; Diamond, 2013). Research has found that individuals with a variety of mental health disorders as well as neurodegenerative disease often perform poorly on EF tasks. Particular attention has been devoted to the study of EF …

The Impact Of Peer Specialists On Client Outcomes: An Examination Of Mediational Factors, Esther Maria Quiroz Santos

Open Access Dissertations

Research demonstrates a positive impact of Peer Based Recovery Support Services (PBRSS) facilitated by peer leaders with lived experience of a Substance Use Disorder (SUD) and/or mental health problems, and who are in stable recovery. The purpose of this study was to investigate PBRSS, their impact on client outcomes (e.g., substance use, health), and the factors (e.g., self-efficacy, perceived relationship with and helpfulness of peer leader) which mediate the relationship between these services and outcomes while controlling for important socio-demographic information (e.g., age). Data were collected across 58 sites within 25 agencies that provide PBRSS delivered by certified peer leaders …

Observations At The Air-Sea Interface: Quantifying Carbon And Heat Exchange In The Gulf Stream Region Using Uncrewed Surface Vehicles, Sarah Nickford

Open Access Dissertations

The atmosphere and ocean communicate via the air-sea interface through the exchange of heat, mass, and momentum. This exchange is maximized in stormy regions such as western boundary currents, like the Gulf Stream in the North Atlantic Ocean. The Gulf Stream experiences frequent storms, many of which occur in the wintertime, bringing strong winds and cold air masses that invigorate exchange. This dissertation focuses on novel in-situ observations collected by Uncrewed Surface Vehicles (USVs) to study the bulk air-sea exchange of carbon dioxide (CO₂) and heat in the Gulf Stream region.

Much of our knowledge of global ocean …

Study Of The Factor Structure Of Commonly Used Measures Of Adhd, Anxiety, And Depression Among College Students, Emily Shepard

Open Access Dissertations

The present study aimed to examine the factor structure of three commonly used assessment methods, the ADHD Rating Scale (ADHD-RS), Beck Depression Inventory-II (BDI-II), and Beck Anxiety Inventory (BAI), among a sample of college students with and without ADHD with the goal of identifying a potential common inattention factor among the three measures. Additionally, the influences of race and sex on the factor structure was assessed. Participants were recruited from nine different universities in the eastern United States study (N = 456, n_ADHD =228). Each measure was analyzed using exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis with comparison across ADHD …

Waiting Too Long To Move At Green Lights, Michael Landreth

Open Access Dissertations

A literary critique of the American working-class experience must be accessible to working-class readers if it hopes to impact or perform any service to its intended audience. Due to its ability to interrogate forms of institutional control that maintain the social hierarchy under which working-class Americans live, a formally experimental literary approach proves likely to be the best approach for critiquing the American working-class experience. Unfortunately, because formally experimental literature requires access to the time and resources needed for training in and exposure to a tradition of artistic experimentation, most working-class readers find formally experimental literature inaccessible. The work in …

The (Mis)Formation Of Identity In Joseph Conrad’S Novels: Ideology, Community, And The Self, Youngji Cho

Open Access Dissertations

Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Nostromo, and The Secret Agent contain two broad themes: on the one hand, they critically portray the dominant influence of society or societal ideologies on the individual from a socio-political standpoint; on the other hand, they focus on the (dis)illusion of the protagonists regarding their own “ideal” identities from a personal standpoint. Rather than addressing one or the other, as many previous studies of Conrad’s novels have done, this dissertation argues for the intimate continuity between socio-political ideologies and personal identity by finding the point of contact between these two seemingly disparate issues. …

Navigating The Higher Education Landscape: Arts-Based Perspectives By Community College Students, Bobby G. Gondola Jr.

Open Access Dissertations

Open-access community colleges in the United States are serving more students from historically marginalized communities than 4-year colleges while also educating half of college students in the United States today. However, educational systems of higher education are structured in a way that individual students may not effectively navigate higher education and the career opportunities that come with it. Better understanding how community college students experience, and how they navigate institutions of higher education, can/could enable colleges to adjust their organizational structures, processes, or practices to support easier navigation. Drawing on the Bioecological Model of Human Development (Bronfenbrenner & Morris, 2006) …

Computational Close Reading: A Critique Of Digital Literary Methodology, Damiano Consilvio

Open Access Dissertations

Computational Close Reading intervenes in digital humanities and American literary scholarship to negotiate a significant institutional and disciplinary problem: the devaluation of close reading and interpretation in digital humanities applications to literary studies in favor of more distant modes of reading. To remedy this issue, I pursue a core question meant to bring the literary and the digital into a more perfect confluence, as a demonstration of possibilities meant to run counter to these preconceptions about computational reading: how “close,” if close at all, can digital technologies bring us to the interpretive elements of literary texts? I argue that they …

Middle Children Of History: Male-Authored Post-1960s Fiction & The Nihilism Of White Male Protagonists, Emma C. Baughman

Open Access Dissertations

This dissertation addresses the phenomenon of the white male nihilist as a recurrent character in British and American fiction post-1960. The utilization of this archetype by predominantly white male authors during this time period is symptomatic of the social, political, and economic changes that fundamentally altered the perception of the white masculine mythos in much of the Western world after the end of World War II. Because the perception of whiteness and masculinity is a primary signifier of the period’s changing value, my project approaches fictional texts of white male nihilism as objects of socio-cultural analysis that constitute a genealogy …

Nano/Bio Interactions For Synthetic And Natural Nanomaterials, Zachary Shepard

Open Access Dissertations

As the field of nanotechnology advances, it is becoming more important to understand nanomaterial interactions with microorganisms. New methods for examining bacterial response to and interaction with nanomaterials are presented in the studies included here. First, bacterial response to two-dimensional nanomaterials is evaluated using a high throughput approach. Next, a calibrated water jet is used to demonstrate the effect of ship speed on biofouling release. Finally, methods of purifying biogenic nanoparticles were reviewed and evaluated for potential application at large scale. Each of these studies utilizes novel techniques for examining bacterial responses or interactions with nanomaterials or nano-enabled surfaces.

The …

Ose And Matrix Filtering For Sisa, Daniel D. Sartori

Open Access Dissertations

The expected value and covariance function of a product processor for a spatially uncorrelated white guassian process has been derived for known sparse geometries such as nested or coprime with uniform taper. When a non-uniform taper is applied, the expected value of the product processor becomes the convolution of the true spatial power spectral density and the spatial Fourier transform of the difference coarray. A windowed estimate of the true autocorrelation function can be obtained by taking the inverse Fourier transform of the output. By extending that function to an estimate of the sample covariance matrix, it can be used …

Fluid-Structure Interaction Of Collapsing Volumes In Confined Environments, Craig Tilton

Open Access Dissertations

Implosion is the sudden inward collapse of a submerged structure caused by hydrostatic loading. Confined implosion is characterized by a surrounding structure that significantly effects the flow of fluid around the collapsing volume. The goal of this work is to further understand the physics of collapsing volumes in confined environments. To do so, multiple studies are conducted, each exploring a portion of the parameter space. The first chapter of this work utilizes a unique facility to perform a comprehensive experimental study investigating the implosion of thin, aluminum cylinders with the addition of flow restriction. These experiments take place inside a …

Modeling, Diagnosis And Control Of Complex Nonlinear Uncertain Dynamical Systems: From Algorithm Design To Physical Experiment, Jingting Zhang

Open Access Dissertations

Complex systems with uncertain and nonlinear dynamics are a large class of very important systems in modern engineering. Typical examples include automatic robots, aeroengines, chemical processes, manufacturing systems, and power networks. In this dissertation, we focus on the problems of dynamics modeling, tracking control, and fault diagnosis of complex nonlinear uncertain dynamical systems (NUDSs), in terms of both algorithm design and physical experiment. The studied NUDSs include: (i) discrete-time lumped parameter systems that are modeled by discrete difference equations; (ii) continuous-time distributed parameter systems modeled by partial differential equations; and (ii) soft robots with a highly nonlinear and uncertain dynamical …

Distributed Control Of Islanded Microgrids, Zhenhua Wang

Open Access Dissertations

Microgrids are small-scale controllable power systems composed of distributedgeneration (DG) units, energy storage systems, and loads. Microgrids can be operated with the bulk power systems or independently from bulk power systems as an island. To stabilize frequency and voltage in islanded microgrids, a three-level hierarchical control strategy is widely implemented which includes primary control, secondary control, and tertiary control. This centralized control strategy suffers from a single point of failure and high communication cost. In addition, it cannot accommodate the plug-and-play operation of DGs in microgrids.

To overcome these challenges, this dissertation focuses on developing distributed robust and resilient control …

Best Management And Egg Washing Practices For Small-Scale Poultry Producers To Improve Food Safety, Julie Bosland

Open Access Dissertations

The goal of this dissertation research was to determine the best management and egg washing practices for small-scale egg producers and backyard chicken owners to help improve food safety. The main goals were to establish the most effective management and egg washing procedures to reduce total coliform bacteria load on eggshells and increase egg cleanliness. To determine the methods used for experiments in chapters 3-5, a survey was conducted on egg handling, washing and management techniques in backyard poultry and small-scale producers within the Northeastern U.S. The effect of management practices and egg washing methods on the eggshell cuticle was …

Thin Film Intrinsic And Extrinsic Sensors For Ceramic Matrix Composites (Cmcs), Kevin Rivera

Open Access Dissertations

Next generation gas turbine engines and hypersonic vehicles are designed and built with ceramic materials due to their superior thermomechanical properties compared to metal alloys that are traditionally used. The structural integrity of these ceramic components are determined via models but temperature, heat-flux and mechanical strain sensors have to be developed specifically for these materials to validate these models. The main requirements for these sensors are that they be able to withstand elevated temperatures, have low surface profiles to not disturb gas flow or impose drag and have minimal mass to not affect any vibrational modes of the components which …

Strategies Towards The Synthesis And Analysis Of Materials With Potential Environmental Impacts, Justin Pantano

Open Access Dissertations

There are a number of environmental issues that are proving to have strong effects on local populations. Chief among them is the growing concentration of contaminants in seawater, of which there are limited ways to detect in a consumer-friendly way. Contaminants such as nitrite and phosphate have strong adverse effects on aquatic life, including algal blooms and observed hypoxia in fish. The main work presented in this dissertation discusses some ways to leverage organic chemistry to develop materials to help combat these contaminants. Chapter 2 discusses the design of a novel monomer and investigates its ability to polymerize under ring-opening …

Evaluation Of The Toxicokinetic Mechanisms Of Perfluoroalkyl Substances: Accumulation, Distribution, And Elimination, Sangwoo Ryu

Open Access Dissertations

Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) are a diverse class of anthropogenic chemicals associated with several adverse health outcomes in humans. The accumulation of these PFAS have been examined over several decades, however, the elucidation of the toxicokinetics of these chemicals are still in its infancy. The distribution and elimination mechanisms of specific PFAS, notably perfluorooctanesulfonic acid (PFOS) and perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA), have undergone comprehensive investigation, however, there are more than 10,000 currently detected PFAS in the environment that have not been examined. It is, therefore, imperative to not only address individual PFAS but also to encompass overarching trends and correlations …

Groundwater Dynamics In An Unconfined Coastal Aquifer: Geophysical Investigations And Modeling, Jeeban Panthi

Open Access Dissertations

Coastal groundwater plays a vital role in the sustainability of coastal ecosystems and the freshwater supply for over one billion people worldwide. Understanding the movement and interaction of saltwater and freshwater in coastal aquifers is crucial for effective water resource management. The interface between these density-contrast waters is highly dynamic and sensitive to natural drivers, such as sea level rise, storm surges, and drought, as well as anthropogenic factors, including groundwater over-pumping. In recent years, the drivers of coastal groundwater dynamics have been increasingly well understood and quantified. However, there is a need for data-model fusion, including integrating different forms …

Acculturative Stress, Mental Health Concerns, And Service Utilization Among Latino Immigrants, Elaine Ruiz

Open Access Dissertations

To better serve the needs of Latino immigrants, we must investigate risk factors for mental health concerns, such as acculturative stress, unauthorized immigration status, and barriers to mental health services (MHS). The purpose of the present study was to: (1) explore the relationship between risk factors and mental health outcomes in a sample of Latino immigrants, (2) examine differences across legal immigration status in mental health outcomes and acculturative stress, (3) assess the mediating effect of anxiety sensitivity, psychological inflexibility, and avoidant coping strategies on the relationship between acculturative stress and anxiety, and (4) examine barriers for MHS utilization among …