Digital Commons Network^™

Graduate Teaching Assistants’ Knowledge And Attitudes Toward Students With Disabilities In Higher Education, Yanlys De La Caridad Palacios

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Students with disabilities are entering higher education at increased rates (National Center Educational Statistics, 2016). The aim of this study was to investigate graduate teaching assistants’ knowledge, attitudes, and professional development needs regarding students with disabilities in higher education. A modification of Sniatecki’s (2015) Faculty Attitudes and Knowledge Regarding College Students with Disabilities Survey was used to gather responses from graduate teaching assistants through an online format. Results of the study indicate that graduate teaching assistants have positive attitudes towards students with disabilities yet lack specific knowledge on accommodations, disability law, and disability support services. Further, respondents expressed a willingness …

Host-Pathogen Coevolution Between Tasmanian Devils (Sarcophilus Harrisii) And Devil Facial Tumor Disease, Dylan Garret Gallinson

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Coevolution is a driving force of rapid evolution, yet the complexity of coevolutionary interactions has made it difficult to characterize the genomic basis of traits mediating such relationships. Coevolutionary dynamics are especially important in host-pathogen systems where the host and pathogen must constantly adapt to one another. The Tasmanian devil and its species-specific transmissible cancer, devil facial tumor disease (DFTD), provide the rare opportunity to study host-pathogen coevolution in a complex natural system. Extensive spatiotemporal devil sampling, high linkage disequilibrium in devils, and a large selective pressure imposed by DFTD facilitate a system tractable for study. Here, we characterized devil …

Computing Group-By And Aggregate In Massively Parallel Systems, Chengcheng Mou

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The semiconductor industry has mainly exploited two routes for designing microprocessors. The multi-core route aims to speed up the performance of latency-oriented processing. In contrast, the many-thread route concentrates on throughput-oriented improvement of parallel processing. Many-thread microprocessors, such as Graphics Processing Units (GPUs), are leading the computing capability for this past a decade. According to the current hardware market, at the similar price range, the ratio of peak computing power between multi-core CPUs and many-thread GPUs is up to 15X. This large performance gap on data processing has motivated many practitioners in database community to exploit computation-intensive parts on GPU …

An Exploratory Study Of Technology Use By Older/Senior Men For Enrichment, Communication, And Social Connectedness, Emerson Campbell Hardy

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

More older adults are moving toward options for digital connection; keeping up with and learning technology is challenging. Older adults’ perceptions of the difficulty of learning to use technology may contribute to their hesitancy to adopt technology options (Barnard, Bradley, Hodgson, & Lloyd, 2013). The purpose of this study was twofold: (1) to explore the experiences of older/senior men learning and using technology for enrichment, communication, and social connectedness; and (2) to identify learning experiences and/or supports that aided these older/senior men in building knowledge, confidence, and comfort in technology use.

This was an exploratory qualitative study utilizing in-depth interviews. …

Applied Anthropology Of Addiction In Clinical Spaces: Co-Developing And Assessing A Novel Opioid Treatment Pathway, Heather Diane Henderson

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Historically, there has been no clear treatment pathway for opioid use disorder (OUD) patients who seek emergency care. Utilizing a trajectories of addiction framework, this dissertation presents insights from an applied anthropology of addiction study in an acute care setting to build a medication for opioid use disorder (MOUD) treatment pathway, aiming to break down the stigma related to opioid use disorder (OUD) and mitigate a lack of treatment options. This dissertation took place in an urban trauma center in Florida, from 2018 to 2021. With almost 1500 hours of participant observation, hundreds of informal interviews, and 30 formal interviews, …

Collaboratively Building A Teaching Model (Tttc) In A Doctoral Science Education Program: An Autoethnography, Alton George Declaire

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This autoethnography illustrates benefits of doctoral education consistent with the holistic paradigm underlying today’s society and development of a practice-research-practice cycle useful to science teacher educators. Emergent hypotheses indicate ways to increase a doctoral student’s well-being, intellectual risk taking, production of creative products, and expedite in-depth learning. The hypotheses were derived from the processes and pathways I used to make sense of the learning opportunities afforded me and features of my experience that led to my well-being and maintaining my enthusiasm despite the significant life challenges I encountered and the tedious parts of the doctoral process.The original research question was, …

Development And Initial Validation Of The Parent And Family Engagement In Higher Education Measure, Michelle R. Mcnulty

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Throughout the history of higher education in the United States, parents and family members of college students have often found themselves as obsolete to the postsecondary experience. Minimal research has been dedicated to understanding the experience of parents and family members of college students until the millennial generation began their collegiate years (Harper et al., 2012; Wartman & Savage, 2008). In consideration of a new generation of college students (i.e., Gen Z) and the ongoing impact of the COVID-19 global pandemic, it is crucial to illuminate the complexities of parent and family engagement in higher education and the needs of …

Empirical And Modeled Δ13c And Δ15n Isoscapes In The Gulf Of Mexico And Their Application To Fish Eye Lens Migration Studies, Brianna Michaud

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Isoscapes are depictions of the spatial patterns of isotopic values in a given area. Isoscapes can be created using measurements form samples (empirical isoscapes) or using statistical models of spatial isotopic variation (modeled isoscapes). Isoscapes have a wide variety of potential applications though, in the realm of marine ecology, they are most often used infer ecological processes, food web linkages, the origin of samples, and the movements of marine organisms.

However, to use isoscapes for these applications, it is necessary to have isoscapes at spatial scales relevant to the application in question. It is also necessary to have isoscapes that …

The Boy Scouts Of America Merit Badge Program And Career Development, Todd R. Van Auken

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of the study was to determine whether a youth’s career development, as defined by the Career Maturity Inventory (CMI Form C), is associated with motivation, student grade level, and number of merit badges earned as a result of participation as Boy Scouts. For close to three decades there has been a call to improve career counseling for middle and high school youth. However, due to a shortage of school counselors in middle and high schools, counselors are inundated with heavy workloads of various responsibilities and do not always have the ability to focus on youth career development. Thus, …

Understanding Food Insecurity As A Multidimensional Construct: A Mixed Methods Approach To Assess Changes In Food Insecurity Status Among People Seeking Emergency Food Assistance, Whitney M. Fung Uy

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Background: In the United States, 13.8 million households were food insecure in 2020, or 10.5% of the country’s population. Although the annual food insecurity rates remained stable between 2019 and 2020, largely due to increased COVID-19 pandemic relief efforts, many households experienced food insecurity and hardship at unprecedented rates. Food assistance provided by the largest government nutrition and food program, Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), and emergency food providers (EFPs) such as food banks and pantries intended to provide short-term solutions have ended up as chronic, long-term methods of survival for many of these families, especially during COVID-19 and the …

Noninvasive In Vivo Optoacoustic Imaging Of Alcohol Use Disorder Using A Mouse Model Of Alcohol Use Disorder, Augustine Meombe Mbolle

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This research has two parts. The first part focuses on the use of photoacoustic imaging (PAI) to study alcohol-induced effects in the cerebral vasculature of selectively bred alcohol-preferring mice. Part two extends the application of PAI by developing a novel Photoacoustic imaging guided system for repetitive low intensity focused ultrasound (PAI-LIFU) stimulation treatment for alcohol use disorder in crossed high alcohol preferring (cHAP) mice.

Photoacoustic imaging is an emerging hybrid non-invasive optical imaging modality which relies on optical absorption contrast to visualize deep tissue structures and function. It combines the high contrast associated with pure optical imaging and the high …

Finding Signal In The Noise: High-Fidelity, Quantitative, Optical Blood Perfusion Imaging With Interference, Abdul Mohaimen Safi

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

For label-free, non-invasive, wide field-of-view (FOV) imaging/monitoring of blood flow, speckle-based approaches are gaining popularity. However, to obtain quantitative flow information, speckle techniques rely on the multi-exposure scheme which requires complex, bulky, and expensive instrumentation, limiting its application to preclinical studies. This dissertation directly addresses these issues. In the first part of this dissertation, we report a novel single shot synthetic multi-exposure speckle imaging (syMESI) method to synthetically produce multi-exposure images from one short single exposure speckle image using spatial binning/averaging. We demonstrate that syMESI can reimagine conventional hardware based MESI, with low-cost single exposure laser speckle imaging (LSCI) instrumentation. …

Passion To Purpose: An Autobiographical Narrative Inquiry Into The Development Of The Summer Ace Program, Owen Hooper

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Students transitioning from high school to college are met with many challenges beyond academics including social acclimation, campus culture integration, and holistic wellness. Researchers agree that a successful and purposeful transition for incoming college students requires involvement and engagement with peers to help students adapt and increase their likelihood to graduate (Astin, 1999; Kuh, 2009; Tinto, 1998). This autobiographical narrative inquiry reflects on past experiences in assessing the needs of transitioning students at the University of South Florida and developing a purposeful programming model to support students. I aim to help the reader understand my personal commitment to these programs …

Torn Between Two Worlds: Role And Identity In Hybrid Teacher Leadership, Lauriann Marie Messier-Jones

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Roles of Hybrid Teacher Leadership (HTL), positions which involve classroom teaching for part of the day and academic coaching, curriculum planning, department chair, or professional development responsibilities for the remainder of the day, are becoming more prevalent due to budgetary concerns and teacher shortages. This autoethnography analyzes the first year of my experience as a Hybrid Teacher Leader in a school district in the Southeastern United States to gain knowledge of my enactment of the role, the ways in which I can learn more about myself as an educator and an academic coach from my experiences in the role, and …

Exploring The Relationship Between Student Expected Engagement And Referrals To The Behavioral Intervention Team, Makenzie R. Schiemann

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Higher education administrators are tasked with supporting and retaining students with increasing needs. These needs often include emotional and mental health issues but can worsen to include suicidality and violence toward others. Traditional campus approaches for supporting students and intervening for violence, such as counseling and campus safety, have been reactionary rather than proactive. Behavioral Intervention Teams (BITs) have emerged as a mechanism for heading off violence before it occurs while also supporting students who may never engage in violence but need support. These teams were born out of the concept that violence is preventable and have grown into a …

Who's Got Your Six: A Formative Evaluation Of A Military-Connected Student Cultural Competency Workshop, Wayne N. Taylor

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The University of South Florida (USF) ranks as one of the top 50 public universities in the nation. As of Spring 2022, 14% of the student population identify as military-connected students (MCS). MCS comprises Active Duty, National Guard, Reserve, veteran or military dependents. Many student veterans choose not to embrace their veteran identity due to feeling unaccepted or viewed from a deficit mindset by faculty, staff, and other students. Veteran studies research identifies the significant influence faculty and staff possess when addressing MCS retention and graduation rates (Lim et al., 2018; Vacchi, 2012; Vacchi, 2018). USF’s Office of Veteran Success …

Informal Communication, Sensemaking, And Relational Precarity: Constituting Resilience In Remote Work During Covid, Tanya R.M. Vomacka

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The COVID-19 global pandemic disrupted every corner of the globe, impacting our personal and professional lives with intensity and scope that have yet to be fully comprehended. One such disruption has been to the workplace and organizational culture as businesses, non-governmental agencies, governments, and other organizations worldwide rapidly moved face-to-face operations to remote work. Two years into the pandemic, with vaccines available and the immediate health threat for most healthy individuals waning, businesses still find themselves confronting a changing paradigm as remote work becomes more of a permanent and competitive fixture.

This study explores the impact of remote work on …

High-Risk Traffic Crash Pattern Recognition And Identification Using Econometric Models And Machine Learning Models, Runan Yang

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Roadway crashes have become a major cause of human deaths and injuries and caused much economic damage. According to World Health Organization (WHO), about 1.35 million people died in traffic crashes and over 50 million people injured from traffic crashes in the year of 2016 (World Health Organization, 2020). Nationally, in the U.S., the latest decade witnessed an increase of over 10% in traffic fatalities (National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), 2019). Similarly, in state of Florida, the fatal crashes increased by 4.62% from 2019 to 2020 (Florida Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles, 2021). To prevent injuries and …

Origin And Epigenetic Regulation Of Cutaneous T Cell Lymphoma, Carly M. Harro

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The pathogenesis of Cutaneous T cell lymphoma (CTCL) remains unclear. Using conditional knockout mice, we found that ablation of the genomic organizer Special AT-rich sequence-binding protein-1 (Satb1) caused malignant transformation of mature, skin-homing, Notch-activated CD4+ and CD8+ T cells into progressively fatal lymphoma. Mechanistically, Satb1 restrained Stat5 phosphorylation and the expression of skin-homing chemokine receptors in mature T cells. H3K27 and H3K9 trimethylation occluded the SATB1 promoter in Sézary cells, while inhibition of SUV39H1/2 methyltransferases (unlike EZH2 inhibition), restored protective SATB1 expression and selectively abrogated the growth of primary Sézary cells more effectively than romidepsin. Additionally, using single-cell RNA/TCR sequencing …

Thermochemical Conversion Of Lipid-Extracted Algal Biomass To Value-Added Sustainable Products, Magdalini Tsarpali

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The extensive use of fossil fuels has increased the CO2 emissions, a phenomenon that has increased the demand for renewable energy and resources. Algae, photosynthetic aquatic organisms, have recently caught attention due to their high growth rate and the high CO2 capture ability. Biofuels and bioproducts from algae are considered promising alternatives because of their lower carbon footprint. Lipids are by far the most popular algal product, as they find applications in both fuels, such as biodiesel, and products, such as nutraceuticals and cosmetics. However, after lipid extraction, conversion of the residual algal biomass to value-added products is viewed as …

Using An Appreciative Inquiry Summit To Improve Support For First Year Experience Community College Instructors, Elise G. Zornow

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This evaluation study had three main aims: 1) to examine how an Appreciative Inquiry (AI) Summit can be used to promote First Year Experience (FYE) instructors’ sense of autonomy, competence, and relatedness within the context of the FYE program at a community college; 2) to examine how an AI Summit might guide FYE program development; and 3) to examine how and in what ways an AI Summit might influence FYE instructors’ intent to act on the recommendations that result from this approach to program development. Instructors teaching the FYE course at a community college in the Southeastern United States were …

Qualitative Examination Of Sex Therapists' Perspectives Regarding Women With Low Sexual Desire, Tatiana C. Bryan

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Female sexual desire disorder is often discussed in the literature, but there is a paucity of data on how sex therapists conceptualize and treat this disorder. To address a gap in the current literature, this study collected the perspectives and attitudes of clinicians working with patients presenting with low sexual desire. This qualitative study aimed to understand how sex therapists’ conceptualization of female sexual desire disorder is used to make decisions about diagnosis, treatment, and assessing patient progress. Grounded theory methodology was used to examine the attitudes and beliefs held by sex therapists. Results were used to generate a framework …

On The Reliability Of Wearable Sensors For Assessing Movement Disorder-Related Gait Quality And Imbalance: A Case Study Of Multiple Sclerosis, Steven Díaz Hernández

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Approximately 33 million American adults had a movement disorder associated with medication use, ear infections, injury, or neurological disorders in 2008, with over 18 million people affected by neurological disorders worldwide. Physical therapists assist people with movement disorders by providing interventions to reduce pain, improve mobility, avoid surgeries, and prevent falls and secondary complications of neurodegenerative disorders. Current gait assessments used by physical therapists, such as the Multiple Sclerosis Walking Scale, provide only semi-quantitative data, and cannot assess walking quality in detail or describe how one’s walking quality changes over time. As a result, quantitative systems have grownas useful tools …

Training Board Certified Behavior Analysts Via Telehealth To Conduct The Trial-Based Functional Analysis, Karie S. John

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Although many behavior analysts recognize the value of conducting a functional analysis (FA), some report being hesitant to conduct the assessment (Oliver et al., 2015). Two potential barriers to conducting FAs include setting limitations (Roscoe et al., 2015) and lack of trained staff (Deochand et al., 2020). Researchers have addressed these limitations by developing variations of the traditional FA and demonstrating that those procedures could be taught across various populations. Perhaps the issue related to training has less to do with the ability to train FA procedures, and more to do with the accessibility of such trainings. Study 1 addressed …

Re-Centering And De-Centering ‘Race’: An Analysis Of Direct-To-Consumer Genetic Testing Organizational Websites, Beatriz Nieto-Fernandez

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

As direct-to-consumer (DTC) genetic testing technologies become an ever-expanding business in the United States, this dissertation project investigates the ways in which two leading organizations, AncestryDNA and 23andMe, utilize discourses of ‘race’ to connect with their customers. This study is particularly significant because it opens up new avenues of research in the field of organizational communication by engaging with a new genre of organizations and the complexities of biocapitalism, in which genetic data is commodified for consumption. Blending computational scraping of data and manual qualitative analysis of organizational texts and videos available on the corporate websites, while using postcolonial studies …

Establishment Of A Melanoma Esc-Gemm Platform And Its Use To Study Pten Tumor Suppressor Functions, Ilah Bok

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The cumbersome and time-consuming process of generating new mouse strains and multiallelic experimental animals often hinders the use of genetically engineered mouse models (GEMM) in cancer research. In chapter 2, we describe the development and validation of an embryonic stem cell (ESC)-GEMM platform for rapid modeling of melanoma in mice. The platform incorporates 12 clinically relevant genotypes composed of combinations of four driver alleles (LSL-BrafV600E, LSL-NrasQ61R, PtenFlox, and Cdkn2aFlox) and regulatory alleles to spatiotemporally control the perturbation of genes of interest. The ESCs produce high-contribution chimeras, which recapitulate the melanoma phenotypes of conventionally bred mice. Using the ESC-GEMM platform to …

Defining And Modeling Pericyte-Induced Capillary Network Assembly, Capillary Regression Preceding Pericyte-Stimulated Fibrosis, And Lymphatic Capillary Regression, Scott Stephen Kemp

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Capillary formation and maturation can only occur through a series of highly orchestrated events that requires the coordinated efforts of both endothelial cells (ECs) and pericytes. While ECs are perfectly capable of creating tube networks on their own, the maturation and stabilization of these tube networks require the presence of a second cell type, pericytes, to create stable capillary networks. Previous studies have identified factors required for pericyte recruitment to EC tube networks, however, we hypothesized that there were still unaccounted for EC-derived molecules that were contributing to pericyte recruitment. In the first part of this study, we used serum-free, …

Targeting The Side-Chain Convergence Of Α-Helical Hot Spots To Design Small-Molecule Mimetics Disrupting Protein-Protein Interaction, Zhen Wang

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

α-Helix accounts for the largest class of protein secondary structures and plays a key role in mediating protein-protein interactions (PPIs). Small-molecule α-helix mimetics mimic the structural features of α-helical hot spots and offer a powerful tool to unravel complex signaling networks and mitigate aberrant PPIs. In this dissertation, the side-chain conformational convergence of α-helical hot spots was disclosed, and insights into the side-chain convergence were exploited to instruct the design of small-molecule α-helix mimetics. The first chapter of this dissertation provides an overview of the characteristics of α-helical hot spots and current strategies to design small-molecule α-helix mimetics. In chapter …

Statistical Monitoring The Quality Of Healthcare Services, Yanqing Kuang

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In today’s healthcare industry, quality of care is a growing focus in the delivery of healthcare. To improve the quality of care in healthcare delivery, many studies focus on the longterm operational decision making to meet the expectations of healthcare providers and users, such as medical resource allocation, bed planning, staff scheduling, etc. These problems are typically parts of long-term operational decision making, however, time is essential in healthcare system. To ensure the adherence to a high quality of care and detect deterioration in real time, the quality of service should be measured over days or hours instead of just …

Improving Robustness Of Deep Learning Models And Privacy-Preserving Image Denoising, Hadi Zanddizari

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Applications of deep learning models and convolutional neural networks have been rapidly increased. Although state-of-the-art CNNs provide high accuracy in many applications, recent investigations show that such networks are highly vulnerable to adversarial attacks. The black-box adversarial attack is one type of attack that the attacker does not have any knowledge about the model or the training dataset, but it has some input data set and theirlabels.

In this chapter, we propose a novel approach to generate a black-box attack in a sparse domain, whereas the most critical information of an image can be observed. Our investigation shows that large …