Digital Commons Network^™

From Words To Growth: Exploring Employee Perceptions Of How Organizational Culture Shapes Effective Feedback Experiences, Amanda Neuts Phd

All Student Scholarship

Organizational culture plays an essential role in shaping how employees experience feedback and whether feedback supports professional growth. While feedback processes have been widely studied, less emphasis has been placed on how employees interpret the organizational culture conditions that influence feedback effectiveness. This qualitative phenomenological study explored employee perceptions of how organizational culture shapes feedback experiences and their impact on professional development, satisfaction, and engagement. Grounded in Schein’s Model of Organizational Culture and supported by Social Exchange Theory, this study investigated how values, underlying assumptions, and artifacts interact with relational dynamics such as trust, reciprocity, and fairness. Analysis of eight …

A Mixed Methods Exploration Of Elementary Music Teacher Approaches And Criteria For Repertoire Selection, Edward J. Holmes

All Student Scholarship

The purpose of this mixed-methods study was to explore the repertoire selection practices of elementary general music teachers in the state of Maine. Participants (N = 94) completed a survey asking for the demographic information of their school community, their level of education, the repertoire resources they most often use when planning, and what criteria would cause them to omit or remove a song or piece from their curriculum. Song collection websites were the most popular repertoire resource among participants, and the leading criteria for a good song choice were songs “with a variety of musical elements”. “Historical context” was …

Vitaltitration Predicts Fermentation Performance Of Phylogenetically Distinct Saccharomyces Cerevisiae Yeast Strains, Samantha White Ms

All Student Scholarship

Accurate assessment of yeast physiological health is essential for achieving consistent, efficient, and predictable beer fermentations. Although yeast vitality is more predictive of fermentation performance than viability alone, no universally adopted vitality assay currently exists in the brewing industry. This thesis investigates vitaltitration (VT) as a rapid, robust, and brewery-feasible method for quantifying yeast vitality and predicting fermentation performance. We hypothesize that VT provides a reliable measure of metabolic competence that correlates with fermentation kinetics across brewery-relevant yeast strains. To test this hypothesis, VT was evaluated alongside Acidification Power (AP) in structured serial-fermentation experiments in two phylogenetically distinct brewing yeasts: …

Describing The Symbolic Components Of A Regional Comprehensive University’S Research Culture: A Qualitative Descriptive Case Study, Joshua Mangin

All Student Scholarship

This dissertation presents a qualitative descriptive case study examining the research culture at Homarus University (HU), a Regional Comprehensive University (RCU) in the northeastern United States. The study addresses a gap in existing research culture literature, which primarily focuses on research-intensive institutions. This project explored the research culture of an RCU through stories, symbols, and traditions related to research. Data was collected through twenty interviews with faculty, staff, and students, alongside an analysis of library archives. The research also incorporated reflective practices by the researcher, acknowledging the researcher’s positionality as both an insider and an outsider to HU's research environment. …

Trauma-Informed Approaches In Correctional Settings, Mahlet T. Habtemeskel

Dissertations, Theses, and Projects

Trauma‑informed care (TIC) has become an important framework for understanding and responding to the needs of incarcerated individuals, who experience disproportionately high rates of childhood adversity, interpersonal violence, and systemic trauma. Research has shown that adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) early victimization shapes individual behavior patterns, justice system involvement, and emotional regulation (Ratcliff et al., 2025; Marotta, 2022). Traditional correctional models rooted in punishment, control, and surveillance often repeat the dynamics of past trauma, exacerbating emotional dysregulation, behavioral challenges, and recidivism (Desai, 2019; Slovinsky, 2023). This thesis examines the theoretical foundations, implementation strategies, and outcomes of trauma‑informed approaches in correctional settings …

Planting The Seeds Of An “Educational Revolution”: The Origins Of Upward Bound, Jack H. Kirby

Department of History

Histories of American higher education tend to suggest that the relationship between the federal government and higher education reached its apex in the 1950s before beginning to decline in the 1960s. How, then, do we understand the creation of federal TRIO programs in the 1960s and their continued growth through the remainder of the twentieth century? TRIO programs are federally funded projects intended to expand college access for non-traditional students. Through the lens of access, this paper argues that the federal government was limited in its ability to influence higher education during the post-war period because of the highly decentralized …

Are College Students Thinking Twice About Having Kids? How Political Factors May Affect The Future Birth Rate In The United States, Gloria Flores

Theses and Dissertations

The trend of the birth rate decline is an important phenomenon which has attracted scholarly attention in the United States. Prior research has explored factors such as income, education, and personal preferences. However, there is minimal research on how the political environment affects people’s family planning decisions. That is, in what ways might perceptions of modern politics affect whether people decide to have children? The limited amounts of research in other countries focusing on political efficacy and its effects on people’s decision to have children have found that people are highly sensible about their political environment when it comes to …

Porous Hydrophobic Adsorbent Coatings For Carbon Dioxide Capture, Samuel Babatunde Olushola

Theses and Dissertations

This work presents the development of a porous, hydrophobic zeolite 13X coating for the separation of carbon dioxide (CO₂) from flue gas or natural gas. Zeolite 13X was combined with yeast, glucose, and sodium alginate as pore-forming agents, and with polytetrafluoroethylene (PTFE) and Polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) as hydrophobicity-inducing agents to enhance water resistance while maintaining CO₂ access to the adsorbent. The study explored PTFE/13X mass ratios ranging from 0 to 2.33 to investigate the interplay between hydrophobicity and CO₂ uptake. The wettability of the coating was characterized by using a temporal water contact angle (WCA) measurement. Increasing …

Low-Vision Students’ Experiences With And Suggestions To Improve Desktop Virtual Reality: A Qualitative Study, Tanveer Mansur Syed

Theses and Dissertations

Visually impaired students have faced challenges in the field of education, particularly in science education. Not surprisingly, the unemployment rate for working-age visually impaired people has been above 70%. This persists despite federal laws to support the education and employment of visually impaired people,

Virtual Reality (VR) technology has evolved for several decades. Its use has proliferated in areas that include education. Today, VR science lab simulations are presented as a cost-effective alternative to traditional science labs. Research shows these to be viable substitutes to traditional science labs without a significant drop in learning outcomes. However, this researcher was unable …

An Experimental Study On Turbine-Based Energy Harvesters For Thermal Underwater Gliders, Stephen Edward Coster

Theses and Dissertations

Buoyancy-driven underwater gliders have been optimized for long-duration missions primarily for continual monitoring of the ocean’s water column. However, longer missions and higher-powered sensors have increased the energy requirements of gliders. While current solutions aim to increase battery capacity, the development of energy-harvesting systems (EHMs) could greatly improve mission capabilities in both ability and duration. This thesis discusses the experimental testing of an underwater glider with an EHM as detailed in the theoretical study, “Development of a Turbine-Based Ocean Thermal Energy Harvesting Mechanism Applied to the Underwater Glider” by Hongbo Hou, PhD. The rear-mounted turbine captures energy using the kinetic …

Degradation And Metabolic Analysis Of Synthesized Quorum-Sensing Signals By The Model Eukaryote Chlamydomonas Reinhardtii, Adam Josef Bach

Theses and Dissertations

Bacterial organisms can “talk” with one another on a colony-wide scale using a communication system known as quorum-sensing (QS) via chemical signals. These signals are produced at a basal rate throughout the life of the bacteria and are classified as autoinducers, which diffuse across the cell membrane. Once the critical concentration is reached, they begin to diffuse back into the cell and initiate a phenotypic change. As these signals exist outside the membrane of their producer, they are also accessible to other organisms. It has already been noted that some plant species uptake these compounds through their roots and break …

Employee Perspectives Of Addiction: Effects On Workplace Dynamics, Alex Silverman

Theses and Dissertations

This study examined how employees perceive and respond to coworkers experiencing substance use disorders (SUDs) and behavioral addictions in workplace settings. Integrating attribution theory, stigma frameworks, and Quality of Work Life (QWL) perspectives, a controlled vignette-based design was administered to 130 employed adults who evaluated hypothetical coworkers across addiction conditions. Multilevel modeling revealed that SUDs were perceived as more severe than behavioral addictions, and higher perceived addiction severity was associated with greater stigmatizing attitudes. Stigmatizing attitudes, in turn, were differentially associated with workplace behavioral responses: stigma was strongly associated with increased distancing and reporting behaviors but was not significantly associated …

Aircraft Fault Detection Via Weight And Bias Analysis Of A Custom First Neural Network Layer, George Harrison Chen

Theses and Dissertations

Fault detection in aircraft is traditionally handled through redundant hardware and comparison algorithms to detect failures. Alternatives like model-based residual generation and data-driven approaches such as supervised fault classification and unsupervised anomaly detection have been explored, but they suffer from practical limitations; model-based methods require accurate system models, and data-driven methods have large constraints on the data limiting scalability and adaptability. This work presents a purely data-driven neural network architecture featuring a custom first layer designed for real-time fault detection where the weights and biases of this layer are used to detect faults. The network requires zero supervision and complements …

Range Extension Of Electric Propulsion General Aviation Aircraft Using Solar Technology, Mary Kathryn Shultz

Theses and Dissertations

Alternative propulsion technologies in aviation have been a long-time topic of interest as operators aim to bypass growing fuel prices and meet environmental sustainability requirements set globally. Research regarding alternative propulsion technologies is primarily centered around marginally improving efficiency of combustion systems or large-scale implementation of novel technologies. This research evaluates the feasibility of implementing solar-integrated propulsion for general aviation aircraft to extend range through a comparison of full-electric, hybrid solar, and internal combustion engine propulsion systems. This evaluation of existing technology by range analysis indicates that hybrid solar‑electric propulsion is viable primarily for short‑range training and recreational aircraft, rather …

Manned Exploration Of Satellites Of The Outer Planets: An Analysis Of Current Technologies And A Discussion Of Advancements Required, Joshua Carson Meador

Theses and Dissertations

The Solar System’s outer planets have many satellites, some of which are known to be the most likely places to find extraterrestrial life in our celestial backyard. Multiple scientific missions have been sent to glean information from these satellites, yet the possibility of a manned expedition has long been exclusive to science fiction stories. This paper intends to collect and analyze the current state of space travel technology to explore the feasibility of such a mission with modern technology and to discuss which future advancements should be the focal point for making such missions a reality. To begin, data on …

Quantifying Noise In Monte Carlo Simulations Of Cosmic Rays In A Shock, Abhro Rahman

Theses and Dissertations

Cosmic rays are a phenomenon known to humankind from the early 1900s, and yet today the details of their physical behavior are not fully settled. While the observed spectral fluxes of cosmic rays follow a power-law trend when plotted against particle energy, the exact mechanisms under which they get to such high energies are still under study. This thesis will undertake a subsection of that task, where the Monte Carlo simulation of particle accelerations is described in Warren (2015), and we aim to identify and quantify the noise inherent in such simulations. This document takes a long path through particle …

Moodify: A Mood-Based Music Recommendation System, Meghana Kagitha

Theses and Dissertations

Music has long been recognised as a powerful tool for emotional regulation, yet existing music streaming platforms often fail to align song recommendations with a user's current emotional state. Moodify is a mood-based music recommendation system designed to bridge this gap by delivering personalised playlists that reflect how a user feels in real time.

This project presents the design, development, and evaluation of Moodify, a mobile application that leverages the Circumplex Model of Emotion to capture user mood through an intuitive two-dimensional valence-arousal interface. Rather than relying on text input or manual search, users plot their emotional state directly onto …

Adaptive Artificial Potential Field Guidance And Control For Autonomous Docking With Uncooperative And Unknown Spacecraft, Steven Holmberg

Theses and Dissertations

The increasing demand for on-orbit servicing (OOS), active debris removal (ADR), and space domain awareness (SDA) missions has increased the need for autonomous spacecraft rendezvous and proximity operations (RPO) with uncooperative and unknown targets. Traditional guidance and control methods are typically designed for cooperative systems with known geometry and state information. This work builds on previous research to develop and evaluate an artificial potential field (APF)-based control framework capable of autonomous operation with minimal prior target knowledge and applicability to both relatively static and tumbling spacecraft.

The proposed APF formulation incorporates established safety constructs from cooperative docking systems, including an …

Moon Adaptive Technology For Extraterrestrial Architectural Robotics (Matear), Candela Noemi Solis Zampini

Theses and Dissertations

The Moon Adaptive Technology for Extraterrestrial Architectural Robotics (MATEAR) focuses on the development of an autonomous robotic system capable of providing structural building blocks directly from lunar regolith. As a sustained human presence on the Moon becomes a necessity, the costly and limited payload capacity associated with transporting construction goods from Earth creates a critical challenge. MATEAR addresses this problem through in-situ resource utilization (ISRU), integrating a regolith processing system onto a remote operated vehicle. The proposed system is designed to collect lunar dust, mechanically compact the material, and apply thermal treatment to enhance cohesion through sintering. These regolith-made bricks …

School Levy Passage Strategies, Brody Schaad

Honors Projects

This research was conducted on the impact of community support on school levies, strategies that impact levy passage, and the impact of levies on student success. Research was done through interviews with K-12 superintendents from various Ohio public school districts, following a review of the current literature available on this topic. It was found that transparency with voters of details such as use of funds and outcomes of levy success is the most important strategy to increase levy passage rate. The increased transparency leads to voters having trust in the district and a better understanding of repercussions, leading to a …

Ecological Responses To Living Shoreline Restoration, Aaron S. Bland

Graduate Theses and Dissertations (2019 - present)

Coastal built communities and natural coastal ecosystems face similar and interrelated hazards: shoreline sediment erosion, shoreline retreat, and worsening storms, each of which is exacerbated by relative sea level rise. Living shorelines are coastal defense projects that incorporate natural habitats to provide more sustainable shoreline defense and improve the coastal ecosystem. Living shorelines have been widely adopted, but their performance has been highly variable, and the mechanisms of project success and failure are unclear. The overarching goal of this dissertation was to better understand the ecosystem responses to coastal restoration, focusing on the primary habitats of coastal salt marsh and …

Alternative, Ashlynn M. Stroud

Graduate Theses and Dissertations (2019 - present)

A series of illustrations, sculptures and comic book issues designed to introduce a series of stories and characters that represent the history and members of a fictional mythology depicting the cultural social group often referred to as the “alternative” community. Alternative takes place in a world that combines high fantasy and science fiction with elements of pop culture and music. This world uses iconography of the various genres of the alternative subculture and music, metal, post-punk, and the evolving scene of the underground with varying visuals from both gothic and industrial time periods. Viewers are encouraged to read and follow …

The Southwest Black Artists Collective: Afro-Modern Ecology, Kinship, And Collectivity In The Desert Southwest, Bradley L. Petty

Art History Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines the Southwest Black Artists Collective (SBAC) as a site of

Afro-diasporic kinship, artistic production, and spatial intervention within the Desert

Southwest. Operating within a region where Black populations are comparatively small

and institutional support is diffuse, SBAC emerges as both a response to and a

reconfiguration of the regional artistic landscape. The Collective constructs an affirming

community through shared artistic practice, exhibitions, and the maintenance of The

Projects/Space in Tucson, Arizona, where public engagement and private creative

exchange coexist.

Drawing on theories of human ecology, this study expands existing frameworks

by introducing the concept of Afro-modern ecology, …

Lyapunov-Krasovskii Based Approach To Time-Delay Systems: Computational Efficiency And Feedback Control, Huan Phan

Dissertations

Time-delay systems arise naturally in many engineering applications due to sensing,actuation, communication, and computation delays. The presence of delays has a significant influence on system performance both positively and negatively. Although Lyapunov--Krasovskii functional (LKF) methods provide a systematic framework for stability analysis and controller synthesis, their implementation often suffers from high computational complexity, particularly for large-scale systems and systems involving multiple feedback channels. This dissertation addresses both computational efficiency and feedback control for linear time-delay systems.The first part of this dissertation develops a decomposition-based approach to reduce the computationalburden of stability analysis. By exploiting structured invariant subspaces associated with the …

Intelligent Surveillance For Weapon Threat Detection: Transformer-Based Detection And Segmentation Using Thermal And Rgb Imagery, Akhila Kambhatla

Dissertations

Proactive public-safety surveillance requires deep learning systems that can detect and segment weapons reliably under real-world conditions. This research develops and evaluates a progressive, multi-phase pipeline that moves (i) from RGB object detection to pixel-level semantic segmentation and (ii) from visible-spectrum cameras to thermal imagery to improve robustness under low-light, clutter, and occlusion. Early phases establish strong detection baselines using one-stage and two-stage detectors (YOLOv5 and Faster R-CNN) for multi-class weapon localization, followed by practical optimization through pruning and ensembling to reduce false positives and computational overhead while maintaining real-time feasibility. Building on the limitations of bounding-box localization, the methodology …

The Phylogenetic And Biogeographic History Of Cranes (Gruidae), Phillip Conrad Williams

Dissertations

Cranes (Gruidae) are a globally distributed clade of large, wetland-associated birds. Prior phylogenetic analyses have shown there to be two major subfamilies, Balearicinae and Gruinae, and five consistently recovered clades within Gruinae. However, the relationships among those five clades has remained contentious. In addition, little has been done to reconstruct the biogeographic history of cranes. To that end, I first inferred phylogeny using a large, nuclear dataset sampled from all 15 extant crane species and two outgroup species. The phylogeny mostly agreed with previous analysis using whole mitochondrial genomes but differed in that the Anthropoides species group formed a sister …

Analysis Of Collective Behavior In Living And Nonliving Systems, Kaitlyn Cohan

Theses, Dissertations and Culminating Projects

This thesis aims at understanding the phenomenon of of self-organization in complex dissipative systems, living and nonliving. Dissipative systems are characterized by their search for energy, interactions with their surroundings and the production of entropy, all of which result in the creation of stable structures or patterns, which persist as long as the initial environmental conditions are maintained. The two specific models that we chose to study here are (a) Futbol (or Soccer) and (b) a chemical system involving free-floating menthol crystals floating on a fluid surface to represent nonliving systems. Using experiments and mathematical models, we will try to …

Programmable Degradation Of Polyethylene Via Amide-Functionalization: A Dual-Path Strategy Combining Palladium-Catalyzed Copolymerization And Enhanced Microbial Breakdown, Safi-Dapetel Balkissou Wouna

Master's Theses

Polyethylene (PE) is one of the most widely used polymers due to its durability, low cost, and chemical stability; however, these same properties contribute to its persistence in the environment. It takes about 1000 years for PE to be degraded by microbes in nature. This study investigates a molecular design strategy to enhance the biodegradability of PE by introducing polar functional groups into its backbone through palladium-catalyzed copolymerization with a Vince lactam-derived comonomer. This strategy was inspired by our previous observation that PHEVD (poly[7-(2-hydroxyethyl)-2,4-divinyl-3-oxa-7-azabicyclo[3.3.0]octane-6,8-dione]), a newly synthesized petroleum derived polymer that is rich of amide group, can be near-completely degraded …

Predictive Composite Manufacturing: Advancing Material And Process Design Using Machine Learning, Mohammad Basit Akram

Doctoral Works at the University of New Haven

Composite manufacturing increasingly requires methods that can support both process monitoring and materials design under conditions of limited sensing, nonlinear behavior, and sparse data. This work addresses that need through machine learning (ML) based studies in two complementary areas: process intelligence for polypropylene extrusion and material intelligence for SiC /SiC mini-composites. The first part focuses on industrial polypropylene extrusion, where melt temperature and melt pressure are important indicators of process stability and product quality, yet remain difficult to estimate and forecast in real time. An explainable ML workflow is first developed for melt-state prediction using industrial extrusion data. The approach …

Risks And Resilience In Transportation Construction Projects: Insights From The Pandemic Disruption, Muhammad Rauf Shaker

Doctoral Works at the University of New Haven

Construction projects are inherently complex and subject to significant uncertainty, making effective risk management essential for successful delivery. Risk identification is a critical first step, enabling proactive planning and informed decision-making throughout the project lifecycle. While risk management is widely practiced by transportation agencies, limited research has focused on risks encountered during the construction execution phase. This dissertation examines risk factors and management practices across public sector construction projects, with a primary focus on transportation infrastructure and the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic. An analysis of 146 Connecticut Department of Transportation (CTDOT) projects identified nine major categories of construction risks, …