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Sports And Greenhouse Gas Emissions: Building A Better Framework For Sustainable Sports Operations, Austin Anahory

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This thesis analyzes the approach to sustainability of American soccer leagues and provides a Greenhouse Gas (GHG) Inventory of the Tampa Bay Rowdies. Sustainability and climate change are rising concerns for most industries, especially the sports industry as it will face many immediate and long term impacts. To address these issues, a sustainability analysis was done of each USL Championship team to assess prominence of sustainability topics from their website. To conduct the GHG inventory, the GHG Protocol was followed and resulted in assessing Scope 1, 2, and 3 of the given soccer team. Assumptions were used to estimate missing …

Effect Of Hyperoxia On Cardiac Pathophysiology In Female Guinea Pig Hearts, Chayapatou Chayawatto

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Hyperoxia is widely implemented in critical care and ICU patients. The administration of a high concentration of inspired oxygen to the lung can unknowingly cause hyperoxia and thereby damaging the lungs and heart due to oxidative stress. Technically, hyperoxia occurs when the patient receives PaO2 > 200 mmHg. Major research focused on hyperoxia-induced lung injury, but nothing is known on its effect on heart. Our lab is the pioneer in understanding the effect of hyperoxia on cardiovascular remodeling using mice model. Previous results show that mice under 72 hours of hyperoxia present severe cardiac pathophysiology. This research uses Guinea pigs, which …

Measurement In Chemistry, Mathematics, And Physics Education: Student Explanations Of Organic Chemistry Reaction Mechanisms And Instructional Practices In Introductory Courses, Brandon J. Yik

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The work in this dissertation is presented in two parts. The first part (Chapters 3 and 4) details work relating to students’ explanations of reaction mechanisms in organic chemistry. The second part (Chapters 5 and 6) details work relating to the evaluating the uptake of research-based instructional practices in introductory chemistry, mathematics, and physics courses.

To evaluate learning of organic chemistry reactions, instructors must ask students to construct written explanations of reaction mechanisms. Written assessments should focus on what is happening and why it is happening to promote deeper student understanding. However, for instructors to gain insight into students’ understanding, …

Accelerating Multiparametric Mri For Adaptive Radiotherapy, Shraddha Pandey

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

MR guided Radiotherapy (MRgRT) marks an important paradigm shift in the field of radiotherapy. Superior tissue contrast of MRI offers better visualization of the abnormal lesions, as a result precise radiation dose delivery is possible. In case of online treatment planning, MRgRT offers better control of intratumoral motion and quick adaptation to changes in the gross tumor volume. Nonetheless, the MRgRT process flow does suffer from some challenges that limit its clinical usability. The primary aspects of MRgRT workflow are MRI acquisition, tumor delineation, dose map prediction and administering treatment. It is estimated that the acquisition of MRI takes around …

Social Media Time Series Forecasting And User-Level Activity Prediction With Gradient Boosting, Deep Learning, And Data Augmentation, Fred Mubang

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In the overall history of technological innovations, social media has only existed for a brief time, however its influence is undeniable. Researchers have found that it can be used to influence elections, spread health misinformation, and aid with financial pump-and-dump schemes. Keeping all this in mind, it is clear that more research is needed to predict the spread of information on social media in order to combat its malicious use.

To that end, in this dissertation, we explore the use of Machine Learning algorithms to perform time series forecasting and user-level activity prediction in social media. We address the different …

Association Between Use Of Remdesivir And Bradycardia, Gibret Umeukeje

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Remdesivir received the first emergency use authorization from the FDA for the treatment of COVID-19. Multiple adverse drug reactions (ADR) have been reported since its approval in October 2020. Bradycardia, defined by a decrease in heart rate has been reported as an adverse event for patients receiving remdesivir for COVID-19 treatment. The purpose of the research is to systematically investigate the frequency of occurrence of bradycardia in adults receiving remdesivir using clinical data derived from the FDA Adverse Event Reporting System (FAERS) database. Patients receiving remdesivir were compared to those receiving Paxlovid, Regen-Cov, and Dexamethasone for COVID-19 treatment to see …

Adaptive Multi-Scale Place Cell Representations And Replay For Spatial Navigation And Learning In Autonomous Robots, Pablo Scleidorovich

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Place cells are one of the most widely studied neurons thought to play a vital role in spatial cognition. Extensive studies show that their activity in the rodent hippocampus is highly correlated with the animal’s spatial location, forming “place fields” of smaller sizes near the dorsal pole and larger sizes near the ventral pole. Despite advances, it is yet unclear how this multi-scale representation enables navigation in complex environments.

In this dissertation, we analyze the place cell representation from a computational point of view, evaluating how multi-scale place fields impact navigation in large and cluttered environments. The objectives are to …

Harmony Of Difference: Theorizing Rashid Johnson's New Universalism In The Grids Of Antoine's Organ, Mark Fredricks

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

My reading of Antoine’s Organ, a sculptural installation created by the artist Rashid Johnson in 2016, explores the artwork as a richly textured response to the limited universalism of modernism. I argue that Antoine’s Organ is a multimodal expression which crafts a harmony of difference using the aesthetic language and forms of both visual art and music. The term “harmony of difference” is taken from and inspired by a composition of the same name by jazz musician Kamasi Washington, and is used within to describe Rashid Johnson’s counterpoint strategy to work differences with and against each other, mobilizing the grid’s …

Towards High Performing And Reliable Deep Convolutional Neural Network Models For Typically Limited Medical Imaging Datasets, Kaoutar Ben Ahmed

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is “The science and engineering of making intelligent machines, especially intelligent computer programs”. Artificial Intelligence has been applied in a wide range of fields including automobiles, space, robotics, and healthcare.

According to recent reports, AI will have a huge impact on increasing the world economy by 2030 and it's expected that the greatest impact will be in the field of healthcare. The global market size of AI in healthcare was estimated at USD 10.4 billion in 2021 and is expected to grow at a high rate from 2022 to 2030 (CAGR of 38.4%). Applications of AI in …

Improving Wireless Networking From The Learning And Security Perspectives, Zhe Qu

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Due to the high development of wireless networking and artificial intelligence, most of the data are generated from mobile devices, which distribute in different environments. As such, how to improve the performance of machine learning-based networking and its security should be carefully considered. To reduce the communication burden and protect private information from users, Federated Learning (FL) is a possible solution for learning-based wireless networking. Although FL achieves much success until now, it also remains some specific issues to be solved. In this dissertation, we propose two FL wireless networking frameworks and discuss two potential security issues.

In the FL …

Advanced Methods For Railroad Station Operation Decisions: Data Analytics, Optimization, Automation, Yuan Wang

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The continued and substantial growth in railroad transportation in many countries inspires railroad operators to leverage advanced methods into better railroad operation decisions. Among all facilities, significant returns on investment can always be achieved by optimizing the operations of network nodes - junctions and stations, because stations usually form the capacity bottlenecks in the system.

There are thousands of decision-making problems in relation to the station operations and can be classified into different levels to achieve different goals. From top to bottom, high-level business strategies aim to make decisions to achieve long-term strategical benefits, such as optimizing local station functionalities …

Exploring Unobserved Heterogeneity Of Stated Preferences Through Latent Class Modeling: Application In Health And Insurance Demand, Suzana Karim

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Unobserved heterogeneity is one of the main concerns for applied economists, particularly when modeling preference estimates for health and healthcare in the stated choice experiments. This thesis illustrates the current state-of-the-art in analyzing preference heterogeneity in health-related stated choice experiment studies and four empirical studies on modeling unobserved preference heterogeneity using some recent advancements in latent class models for controlling scale variation. This dissertation contributes to the field of health economics and econometrics. In chapter1, I have described the motivation, thesis objectives, conceptual framework, and contribution of my research to the existing literature.

Chapter 2 is focused on an in-depth …

An Enterprise Risk Management Framework To Design Pro-Ethical Ai Solutions, Quintin P. Mcgrath

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The effective use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) has immediate business benefits for an organization and its stakeholders through efficiency and quality gains, and the potential to explore and implement new business models. However, there are risks of unintended ethical consequences. Enterprise Risk Management (ERM) focuses on managing risk while maximizing business value from exploiting opportunities. Using applied ethics as a basis and the perspective that ethics includes both enabling human flourishing and not violating accepted norms, I argue that greater business value is achieved when an organization simultaneously targets the maximization of benefits and the minimization of harms for the …

Chemical Investigation And Drug Discovery Potential Of Terpenoid Secondary Metabolites From Three Deep-Sea Irish Soft Corals, Joshua Thomas Welsch

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Secondary metabolites produced primarily by terrestrial plants and animals have provided the basis for treatments and cures of human diseases as far back as historians have been able to probe. However, recent technological advances including the self-contained underwater breathing apparatus, and even further remotely operated vehicles, have allowed researchers a unique opportunity for targeted collection of marine organisms at depths previously thought to possess conditions unsustainable for life as was understood. This has afforded a glimpse into the potential for not only life, but the potential for new biochemical adaptations developed over billions of years that have been evolutionarily developed …

Joint Models For Repeated Measured, Non-Normally Distributed Multilevel Data, Weiwei He

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Clinical trials have tended to collect both survival information and longitudinal biomarkers, as well as other covariates. In order to better assess the severity of diverse diseases, we need to collect various longitudinal outcomes. Furthermore, longitudinal data could consist of a number of different measurements of varying types. The multilevel item response theory (MLIRT) model has been widely used in several fields such as public health and health sciences for multivariate longitudinal outcomes. Joint models combining the longitudinal and survival processes, as well as the relation between them, have been developed to minimize bias and improve the efficiency of estimates. …

Advanced Analytical Method Development: From Highly-Enrolled Classroom To Data-Intensive Proteomics, Laxmi Sinduri Vuppala

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In analytical chemistry, method development is key to identifying, separating, and quantifying chemical components of interest systems. The chemical aspects are fundamental to understanding the subject of any analytical system, whether in academic research, industry, or government. These methodologies serve as a bridge between the classroom, where students are taught to be curious and enlightened, and research, where one strives to contribute. The Ph.D. dissertation integrates advanced methodologies in basic and applied research and advanced instrumentation, but the core criteria for validation remain the same. As part of chemical education curriculum development, a large cohort of undergraduates performed two gas …

4d Printing Of Smart Hydrogel Scaffold To Program Neural Stem Cell Differentiation, Omar Khater

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Injuries like Traumatic brain injuries (TBI) and Spinal cord injuries (CSI) areconsidered one of the biggest challenges in the medical sector as there is no specific treatment for these injuries and the medical intervention on these injuries is restricted to reducing the pain and removing the damaged human parts. One of the helpful and most effective treatment methods for these injuries involve neural tissue regeneration in the area of the injury. The main issue when trying to treat such injuries is that neural tissues are often unable to regenerate by themselves and require outer human intervention to differentiate. Biomedical scaffolds …

Functional Morphology And Taphonomy Of Ordovician–Silurian Diploporan Echinoderms, Stephen Ashley Hill

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Diploporan echinoderms were one of the most speciose groups of stemmed echinoderms during the Ordovician. Despite this widespread abundance, the fossil record of diploporan fauna consists primarily of incomplete specimens, with complete specimens being rare. While the theca, or body, is more commonly preserved, the feeding appendages and the attachment structures (i.e. stems or holdfasts) are seldomly preserved. Insight into these features is highly valuable to the understanding the paleoecology, like the feeding and respiratory strategies, of these enigmatic creatures.

One group of diploporan echinoderms which does have an extensive fossil record, is the Holocystites Fauna, primarily known from the …

Advising Latinx Students For Postsecondary Career And Technical Education (Cte): A Qualitative Study Of High School Counselors In Florida, Adriana C. Magana

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this study was to gather detailed descriptions of information, resources, and interventions that school counselors use to inform and advise Latinx students of postsecondary CTE options. A qualitative study with semi-structured interviews was conducted to understand how Florida school counselors advise Latinx students for postsecondary Career and Technical Education (CTE) options. A three-prong conceptual framework was used, drawing from Bourdieu’s (1986) Theory of Cultural Capital, career development theories, and the American School Counselor Association’s (ASCA) National Model.

Ten school counselors working in public high schools in Florida participated in semi-structured interviews for this study. Altogether, the study’s …

Coupling 210Pb And 14C To Constrain Carbon Burial Efficiency Of Blue Carbon Ecosystems, Tynisha R. Martin

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Blue carbon ecosystems cover a small global area but have the potential to sequester large amounts of organic carbon (OC) from the coastal ocean in the sediment. Organic carbon is continually remineralized and exported in the dissolved form, which is currently only poorly accounted for in blue carbon budgets. Constraining carbon cycling in blue carbon systems is complicated by the range of carbon sources and sinks in the system and high export rates from the system. By coupling 14C and 210Pb chronometers to ascertain the amount of primary production stored within peat, it is possible to study carbon transport through …

Inland Tropical Cyclone Intensity Decay In The Continental United States, Yijie Zhu

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Tropical cyclone (TC) hazard preparation is mostly focused on coastal cities with less attention typically paid to inland regions. The impact of TCs that propagate far inland is often underestimated and can cause unexpected loss of life and economic loss. This dissertation aims to understand the decay process of TCs during the post-landfall stage by answering three main research questions: (1) What are the general patterns of inland tropical cyclones, including spatial variations, decay rates, and translation speeds? (2) Are there temporal changes in the intensity decay from inland moving hurricanes? (3) How is the hurricane post-landfall dissipation related to …

The Effects Of Temperature And Oxygen Availability On Aerobic Performance In Three Coastal Shark Species; Squalus Acanthias, Carcharhinus Limbatus, And Carcharhinus Leucas, Alyssa M. Andres

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Anthropogenically driven climate changes are altering marine habitats globally. Rising sea surface temperatures and coastal eutrophication, arising from global warming and coastal nutrient loading, have resulted in progressive ocean deoxygenation. This may restrict available habitat of marine organisms as studies suggest that the balance between metabolic oxygen demand and environmental supply plays an important role in limiting viable habitat and species fitness. As ectothermic predators, with temperature-dependent metabolism and high metabolic demands, coastal shark species may be susceptible to shifts in ocean temperature and oxygen. Such environmental changes may alter metabolic performance and ultimately success and survival within shark habitat. …

Nano-Optical Imaging Of 2d Materials In The Quantum Regime, Hana Nazari Hrim

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Chemical vapor deposition (CVD) growth of atomically thin 2D materials, such as transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDs), is a complex process that has not been completely understood. Large-scale growth of monolayer TMDs often leads to polycrystalline films with heterogeneous morphological and optical properties. Previous optical studies of 2D materials by far-field photoluminescence (PL) provided insights into CVD growth mechanisms of simple crystals, which were, however, limited in spatial resolution due to the diffraction limit. Here we performed correlated morphological and tip-enhanced PL (TEPL) imaging of CVD-grown polycrystalline monolayer molybdenum diselenide (MoSe2) flakes with heterogeneous optical response. We observed nanoscale spatial variations …

Deep Learning And Feature Engineering For Human Activity Recognition: Exploiting Novel Rich Learning Representations And Sub-Transfer Learning To Boost Practical Performance, Ria Kanjilal

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

A significant gap exists in our knowledge of how domain-specific feature extraction compares to unsupervised feature learning in the latent space of a deep neural network for a range of temporal applications including human activity recognition. This dissertation aims to address this gap specifically for human activity recognition using acceleration data. To ensure reproducibility, we use two publicly available datasets, UniMiB-SHAR and ExtraSensory, with a well-established history in the human activity recognition literature. We methodically analyze the performance of 64 different combinations of i) learning representations (in the form of raw temporal data or extracted features), ii) traditional and modern …

Elucidating The Sources Supplying Aerosol Iron, Zinc, And Cadmium To The Surface Of The North Pacific Ocean With Stable Isotopes, Zach B. Bunnell

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Transition metals, such as iron (Fe), zinc (Zn) and cadmium (Cd), are found at just trace amounts within the global oceans yet are vital for many biological functions of phytoplankton. As a result, these metals influence the ocean’s efficacy for carbon sequestration. Atmospheric dust is the primary input of Fe to various surface waters and may also supply Zn and Cd to oligotrophic surface waters. Here, I present Fe, Zn, and Cd isotope data from the US North Pacific GEOTRACES Section GP15 (Alaska-Tahiti) from the low-dust season (Sept. – Nov. 2018). Using this data and aerosol enrichment factors, I show …

Zooplankton Biodiversity In The Northeast Gulf Of Mexico And On The West Florida Shelf From 2005 - 2014, Megan Ferguson

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Zooplankton abundance and biodiversity was measured in the northeast Gulf of Mexico (NEGoM) and on the West Florida Shelf. Bongo net samples were collected between May 2005 to September 2009 through the SEAMAP program, and between July 2010 to August 2014 through the C-IMAGE program. Calanoid copepods were the most abundant zooplankton group in most of the samples collected, but ostracods, larvaceans, and chaetognaths were also abundant. Shannon and Inverse Simpson indices were calculated for all zooplankton samples and generally showed similar trends, but only Shannon indices were used for statistical analyses. In the winter and spring there were significant …

A Protein-Based Therapeutic Combination For The Treatment Of Hard-To-Heal Wounds, Graham L. Strauss

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Chronic wounds present many clinical challenges in relation to the successful treatment and closure of the damaged tissue. Most current treatment methods focused on one or two aspects to drive wound closure, while most chronic wounds are multifactorial environments with many of those dependencies relying on the termination of one another to effectively gain tissue construction, closure, and full skin thickness and composition. Natural wound healing processes allude to potential biologics that can impede the chronic breakdown of tissue, while restoring deposition of new tissue, and effectively leading to a healed wound. Proteases secreted by the body’s immune system lay …

Ocean Eddies And Frontal Zones In The Gulf Of Mexico And Straits Of Florida, Yingjun Zhang

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Ocean eddies and fronts in the Gulf of Mexico (GoM) and the Straits of Florida (SoF) play important roles in ocean physics, biology, and ecology. These two ubiquitous physical features have been studied worldwide for decades, yet many questions remain unanswered or poorly studied for the GoM and SoF. This study aims to improve the understanding of ocean eddies and frontal zones in the GoM and SoF using satellite remote sensing, in situ observations and model outputs, as well as state-of-the-art algorithms, with the following objectives: 1) analyze the three-dimensional (3-D) statistical characteristics and thermohaline structure of mesoscale eddies in …

Large Area Projection Sintering Of Semicrystalline Polymers And Part Analysis Of The Printed Specimens, Taranjot Kaur

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

As the requirements posed to products have increased in recent years. The trend towards individualized serial products steps up the need for respective manufacturing techniques to be more and more flexible. Conventional techniques of serial production, such as injection molding, are unable to fully meet the requirements of this trend. Additive manufacturing techniques generate components directly from a CAD data set while requiring no specific mold, producing minimal waste, and reaching satisfactory geometric accuracy. This is how, as opposed to conventional techniques, they comply with these increased demands to processing technology. Over the last two decades, the research community has …

Ultrafast Magneto-Optic Study Of Exchange Interactions In Magnetic Materials, Hengzhou Liu

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Magneto-optic Kerr Effect (MOKE) is a very important method to investigate the magnetization ofmaterials with the polarization and intensity of light reflected from a sample. Both dynamic and static MOKE are performed to study the magnetic properties of thin films and bulk crystals in this research. For the static MOKE measurement, a solid state laser was used to probe the samples to generate a hysteresis loop by changing the external field from -0.8 T to 0.8 T. The magnet can be placed at an angle between 0 to 20 degree with respect to the sample surface to probe different sample …