Digital Commons Network^™

Barriers To Completing Degrees For Uaf Ph.D. Students, Hannah L. Whitaker

Counseling

A student faces several challenges when working towards a doctoral degree. Previous research has demonstrated that discrimination, lack of support, poor mentorship, funding issues, mental health concerns, and minority stress are barriers to degree completion. The available research also suggests that these difficulties are especially challenging for underrepresented students. Although universities are currently attempting to mitigate certain of these barriers, more can be done to understand the doctoral experience as a way of supporting students. Focus groups were conducted for this thesis to explore the barriers, strengths, and advice for others that doctoral students have at the University of Alaska …

Age Related Dementias, Shahab Soltani

Chemistry and Biochemistry

During the last few decades, the average life expectancy has dramatically increased in the U.S.A. and globally. As a result, the diseases associated with age, such as dementia, significantly impact families, society, and government. Dementia is a broad term describing memory loss, cognitive dysfunctions, and limited social skills caused by many factors such as aging, stroke, and genetic background. Although the primary etiology remains unclear but inflammatory reactions, neurodegeneration, vascular abnormalities play an important role in the progression of these disorders. Therefore, treatment is mainly supportive to relieve the symptoms of dementia and not to cure dementia or slow down …

Unbuilding: How Deconstruction Is Saving The Planet By Giving Building Materials A Second Life, Diana M. Ducroz

Capstones

In 2018, more than 600 million tons of construction and demolition (C&D) waste was generated in the United States, more than twice the volume of ordinary trash created by American households and businesses. Even though 80-95% of this concrete, asphalt, steel, wood, drywall, glass and brick can be reused, repurposed or recycled, a quarter of it – or 145 million tons in 2018 – ends up in landfills. Thirty million tons of wood alone – often sturdy, irreplaceable old-growth lumber – is being trashed every year.

Now, a budding ‘build reuse’ movement, made up of environmentalists, architects, historic preservationists, city …

Computational Thinking For Teachers, Susan Imberman

Open Educational Resources

This is a syllabus for a course in computational thinking. The course described introduces preservice and inservice teachers to the fundamental concepts of computer science, including web design, coding, ethics, computational thinking, course resources, etc.

Forced Together, Growing Apart: An Exploration Of Heterosexual African American Males' Disengagement In Romantic Relationships With African American Females, Kenya Johns

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The decline of intraracial dating has been more pronounced among African Americans in comparison to other racial groups. There is lack of available research tailored towards Black men’s dating experiences. The purpose of this study was to explore the lived experiences of heterosexual African American males related to their disengagement in romantic relationships with African American females.

A phenomenological study explored the lived experiences of 10 African American males and the dynamics that appear to contribute to the decline in intraracial dating in the African American community. Five themes emerged from the study: – self-regard, family matters, proximity, the new …

Implementing A Proctored Aleks-Based Adaptive Learning Strategy To Evaluate Student Preparedness And Predict Success In Calculus I At The University Of Alaska Fairbanksanks, Md Azizul Islam

Mathematics and Statistics

In Fall 2016, the Department of Mathematics and Statistics (DMS) at the University of Alaska Fairbanks (UAF) initiated a study to determine if the Assessment and LEarning in Knowledge Spaces Placement, Preparation, and Learning test (ALEKS PPL), given under proctored conditions, can be an effective tool for measuring student preparedness and predicting success in Calculus I while controlling for enrollment and demographic information. The study includes 583 students who took a Calculus I course in Fall 2016, Fall 2017, Spring 2018, Fall 2018, Spring 2019, and Spring 2020 semesters and took a Proctored ALEKS PPL test (PAPL). Of the 583 …

Population Estimates Of Brown Bears Near Yakutat, Alaska Using A Bayesian Integrated Population Model, Mackenzie Parrott

Mathematics and Statistics

This paper discusses the specification of an Integrated Population Model (IPM) for the brown bear (Ursus arctos) population within and near Yakutat, Alaska. A Bayesian analysis is used in this paper in conjunction with Markov Chain Monte Carlo in order to produce the results. The goal of this project is to estimate the number of brown bears over multiple years. This project was made possible in collaboration with the Alaska Department of Fish and Game (ADF&G) Department of Wildlife Conservation through Anthony Crupi and Jason Waite.

A Literature Review Of Wetland Treatment Systems Used To Treat Runoff Mixtures Containing Antibiotics And Pesticides From Urban And Agricultural Landscapes, Emily R. Nottingham, Tiffany L. Messer

Biosystems and Agricultural Engineering Faculty Publications

Wetland treatment systems are used extensively across the world to mitigate surface runoff. While wetland treatment for nitrogen mitigation has been comprehensively reviewed, the implications of common-use pesticides and antibiotics on nitrogen reduction remain relatively unreviewed. Therefore, this review seeks to comprehensively assess the removal of commonly used pesticides and antibiotics and their implications for nitrogen removal in wetland treatment systems receiving non-point source runoff from urban and agricultural landscapes. A total of 181 primary studies were identified spanning 37 countries. Most of the reviewed publications studied pesticides (n = 153) entering wetlands systems, while antibiotics (n = 29) had …

Spin-Dependent Electronic Transport In Noncollinear Antiferromagnetic Antiperovskites, Gautam Gurung

Department of Physics and Astronomy: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Spin-dependent properties are the heart of spintronic devices. Spintronics exploits electron’s spin, in addition to charge, to process and store the information. Recently, antiferromagnetic (AFM) spintronics has emerged as a subfield of spintronics, where an AFM order parameter (the Néel vector) is exploited to control spin-dependent transport properties. Due to being robust against magnetic perturbations, producing no stray fields, and exhibiting ultrafast dynamics, antiferromagnets can serve as promising functional materials for spintronic applications.

Among antiferromagnets, high Néel temperature noncollinear antiperovskites ANMn₃ (A = Ga, Ni, Sn, and Pt) are interesting due to their magnetic group symmetry supporting non-trivial spin-dependent …

Training The Next Generation Of Climate Science Integrators: Lessons From The Landscape Conservation Cooperatives, Fiona Rowles

Natural Resources

Science that can be readily applied to policy or decision-making is a critical component of adapting to the climate emergency. Boundary spanning facilitates the creation of credible, relevant, and legitimate science for use in policy and decision making. Individuals who are adept at navigating the interface between science and decision making (referred to as "boundary spanners") are crucial in developing science that fits the needs of managers. Though the attributes and skills needed to be an effective boundary spanner are well-defined, individuals are not often trained for these roles. This study incorporates two sets of interviews conducted with employees and …

Design And Synthesis Of Small Molecular Probes For Cns And Kidney Disorders, Swagat H. Sharma

Theses & Dissertations

The G protein regulated inwardly rectifying potassium channels (GIRK) are a family of inwardly rectifying potassium channels and are key effectors in signaling pathways. GIRK 1/2 channel subunit, predominantly found in the brain, is involved pathophysiology of various neurological disorders including, but not limited to, epilepsy, anxiety, Parkinson's, pain, reward, and addiction. Previously, our laboratory had identified a series of urea containing molecules as GIRK1/2 preferring activators. Unfortunately, the urea series suffers from significant PK liabilities (solubility, brain penetration and high clearance). The chapter 1 of the dissertation describes our efforts in developing three new series of activators with improved …

Approximate Likelihood Based Estimations For Joint Models With Intractable Likelihoods, Karl Stessy M. Bisselou

Theses & Dissertations

This dissertation focuses on the development of approximation approaches for the joint modeling (JM) of repeated measures data and time-to-event data in the presence of analytically or numerically intractable likelihoods. Current likelihood-based inferences for JMs show several limitations including (i) intractability of integrals during marginal likelihood derivations due to the complexity in computations, and (ii) the large number of nuisance parameters (unobserved) posing a problem with convergence. The h-likelihood (HL) and synthetic likelihood (SL) are two computationally efficient estimation approaches that overcome these challenges.

In the presence of extremely high censoring rates, the HL can produce bias parameter estimates. We …

Understanding The Impact Of Chlamydia Trachomatis Infection On Host Vesicular Trafficking, Lisa M. Jorgenson

Theses & Dissertations

Chlamydia trachomatis is a highly evolved obligate intracellular bacterial pathogen. During infection, organisms reside within a host epithelial cell in a membrane-bound vacuole called the inclusion. The inclusion membrane contains both pathogen and host components, including unique chlamydial type III effector proteins called Incs and host lipids like cholesterol and sphingomyelin. The inclusion membrane serves as the main barrier between the bacteria and the host cytosol, and thus, functions as the platform supporting host-chlamydial interactions. Via the inclusion membrane, C. trachomatis intercepts components of host vesicular traffic including many host SNARE proteins, which are a conserved family of eukaryotic proteins …

Nitrogenase Iron Protein Classification Using Cnn Neural Network, Amer Rez

Master's Projects

The nitrogenase iron protein (NifH) is extensively used to study nitrogen fixation, the ecologically vital process of reducing atmospheric nitrogen to a bioavailable form. The discovery rate of novel NifH sequences is high, and there is an ongoing need for software tools to mine NifH records from the GenBank repository. Since record annotations are unreliable, because they contain errors, classifiers based on sequence alone are required. The ARBitrator classifier is highly successful but must be initialized by extensive manual effort. A Deep Learning approach could substantially reduce manual intervention. However, attempts to build a character-based Deep Learning NifH classifier were …

Rooted In Environmental Justice: Phytogeography And Ethnoecology Of Serianthes, Else Demeulenaere

Biological Sciences

Serianthes Benth. (Fabaceae) is one of the most endangered plant genera in the world, with 12 of the 18 species listed on the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species. Serianthes trees are culturally important to island communities of the Indo-Pacific region for canoes, boats, traditional houses, and medicine. Habitat loss and ecosystem degradation increased pressure on these trees, also threatening its Indigenous cosmology and traditional practices. This interdisciplinary study integrated genomic, biogeographic and ethnoecological approaches to develop appropriate policies that protect the Indigenous biocultural diversity of Serianthes. Phylogenomics of 401 nuclear exons and non-coding flanking regions using both a multi-species …

Poor Acclimation To Experimental Field Drought In Subalpine Forest Tree Seedlings, Alex Goke, Patrick H. Martin

Biological Sciences: Faculty Scholarship

The ability of tree species to acclimate and tolerate projected increases in drought frequency and intensity has fundamental implications for future forest dynamics with climate change. Inquiries to date on the drought tolerance capacities of tree species, however, have focused almost exclusively on mature trees with scant in situ work on seedlings, despite the central role that regeneration dynamics play in forest responses to changing conditions. We subjected naturally established seedlings of co-dominant subalpine conifer species (Abies lasiocarpa and Picea engelmannii) in the southern Rocky Mountains to 2 years of in situ summer precipitation exclusion, simulating summer drought …

Achieving Fairness Through Load-Balancing In Social Cloud Computing Networks, Kaiyi Huang

Master's Projects

Cloud-based computing networks have taken over the digital landscape. From small non-profits to large multinational corporations, more and more entities have been offloading computing effort to the cloud in order to take advantage of the increased cost-efficiency and scalability of cloud computing. One of the new types of cloud that have emerged is the P2P cloud, which disengages from a traditional datacenter setup by allowing users to instead share their own computing hardware into a cloud to take advantage of cloud computing’s advantages at an even lower cost. However, this new paradigm comes with a slew of challenges, notably, security …

Task Classification During Visual Search Using Classic Machine Learning And Deep Learning, Devangi Vilas Chinchankar

Master's Projects

In an average human life, the eyes not only passively scan visual scenes, but most times end up actively performing tasks including, but not limited to, searching, comparing, and counting. As a result of the advances in technology, we are observing a boost in the average screen time. Humans are now looking at an increasing number of screens and in turn images and videos. Understanding what scene a user is looking at and what type of visual task is being performed can be useful in developing intelligent user interfaces, and in virtual reality and augmented reality devices. In this research, …

The Impact Of Programming Language’S Type On Probabilistic Machine Learning Models, Sherif Elsaid

Master's Projects

Software development is an expensive and difficult process. Mistakes can be easily made, and without extensive review process, those mistakes can make it to the production code and may have unintended disastrous consequences.

This is why various automated code review services have arisen in the recent years. From AWS’s CodeGuro and Microsoft’s Code Analysis to more integrated code assistants, like IntelliCode and auto completion tools. All of which are designed to help and assist the developers with their work and help catch overlooked bugs.

Thanks to recent advances in machine learning, these services have grown tremen- dously in sophistication to …

Dynamic Resource Management Of Fog-Cloud Computing For Iot Support, Mariia Surmenok

Master's Projects

The internet of things (IoT) is an integrated part of contemporary life. It includes wearable devices, such as smart watches and cell phones, as well as sensors for Smart City. Fog computing can improve the efficiency and battery life of IoT devices by offloading tasks to fog cloud. It is important to have fog clusters near the IoT device for faster data offload. The goal of this project is to develop dynamic resource allocation for on-demand fog computing cluster to efficiently deploy tasks from IoT. This report studies the different research papers about the current state of resource management in …

Privacy Preserving For Multiple Computer Vision Tasks, Amala Varghese Wilson

Master's Projects

Privacy-preserving visual recognition is an important area of research that is gaining momentum in the field of computer vision. In a production environment, it is critical to have neural network models learn continually from user data. However, sharing raw user data with a server is less desirable from a regulatory, security and privacy perspective. Federated learning addresses the problem of privacy- preserving visual recognition. More specifically, we closely examine and dissect a framework known as Dual User Adaptation (DUA) presented by Lange et al. at CVPR 2020, due to its novel idea of bringing about user-adaptation on both the server-side …

Naturally Occurring Etiologic Factors Affecting The Health Of Breeding Seabirds In The Bering Sea, Maile Branson

Biological Sciences

Seabird populations across the globe have experienced both significant instability and consistent overall declines in recent history. Seabirds in the Bering Sea of Alaska, USA appear to be severely affected by environmental changes, exhibiting large-scale shifts in behavior and distribution and increases in unusual mortality events (UMEs) in recent years. I analyze a selection of the naturally occurring pathogenic and toxicological factors affecting breeding seabirds in the Bering Sea region using an approach focusing on zoonoses and bioaccumulating toxins. Specimens were collected at three breeding colonies in the Bering Sea in 2018 and 2019, and were evaluated for the presence …

Fasting Status Of Steller Sea Lion Pups, Stephanie G. Crawford

Biological Sciences

Following population declines in species of concern, wildlife managers often seek to identify underlying causes to understand and predict population dynamics for better future management. Often, physiological and/or behavioral metrics are measurable markers of decline, and these are often detectable well before declines are measurable through population surveys. During the 1970's, 80's, and 90's Steller sea lion (SSL; Eumetopias jubatus) populations in the western portion of their breeding range declined by ~85%. Though declines in most regions have since stabilized or exhibited modest recovery, some subpopulations breeding in the Aleutian Islands continue to decline. In contrast, SSL subpopulations in eastern …

21st-Century Skillset Perceptions Of Students In An Information Technology Career Academy Compared To Those At A Comprehensive School, Edward C. Fletcher Jr., Amber D. Dumford

Journal of Research in Technical Careers

In this study, we compared the perspectives of students’ 21st-Century competencies (critical thinking and communication, applied learning, and intrapersonal and interpersonal skills) based on participating in an urban magnet information technology (IT) career academy compared to a traditional, comprehensive high school. We utilized propensity score matching to match academy and comprehensive high school learners on various demographic variables. The propensity score matching resulted in 299 matched pairs (n = 598). Using the matched groups, we ran linear regression models to investigate the relationship between school participation and students’ perceptions of their 21^st-Century skill attainment. We found that …

A Survey Of Faculty Perceptions Of Community College Career And Technical Education, Thomas Gauthier Dr.

Journal of Research in Technical Careers

Community colleges are the leaders in facilitating career and technical education (CTE), and faculty help develop program offerings on campus. This study explored faculty perceptions of community college CTE programs using the survey research method. Participants included 36 faculty members from various disciplines from 15 state colleges in Florida. Participants were sent a digital survey and asked to use a scale from 0 (do not agree) to 8 (agree) to score their agreement level with 43 statements of opinion. Data revealed that community college faculty perceive CTE as beneficial, but CTE programs must include the habits of mind and support …

Systems And Methods For Scalable Retinal Screening Programs, Jeremy Richard Benson

Computer Science ETDs

This dissertation addresses gaps in artificial intelligence-based computer vision tasks in the medical image processing field. We demonstrate effective methods for standardizing and augmenting digital fundus photographs so that robust convolutional neural network-based systems can perform high-throughput disease classification and generalize to never-before-seen data from novel camera technologies, scaling with the changing hardware landscape, as well as keeping up with vast amount of incoming data from the ever-increasing population. We also tackle the problem of discovering relevant samples in an unlabeled cohort of image data, thus widening the bottleneck to all downstream supervised machine learning tasks.

Engineering Advanced Micro And Nanofiber Materials For Biomedical Applications, Alec D. Mccarthy

Theses & Dissertations

At the functional crossroads of engineering and biomedical sciences lies the interdisciplinary field of biomedical engineering. Principles of biomedical engineering are vast, and the rigorous application of engineering towards clinically-relevant medicine has the ability to take novel concepts from bench to bedside. Arguably one of the most promising and productive sub-fields within the biomedical engineering discipline is biomaterial engineering. Here, novel biomaterials, synthesized from natural, synthetic, or hybrid materials, can be used in tissue repair and regeneration, hemostasis, as anatomical support and drug delivery vessels, or as diagnostic devices.

Of particular interest are applications of nanofiber and microfiber objects, which …

Pentagonal Extensions Of The Rationals Ramified At A Single Prime, Pablo Miguel Rodriguez

Theses and Dissertations

In this thesis, we define a certain group of order 160, which we call a hyperpentagonal group, and we prove that every totally real D5-extension of the rationals ramified at only one prime is contained in a hyperpentagonal extension of the rationals. This generalizes a result of Doud and Childers (originally conjectured by Wong) that every totally real S3 extension of the rationals ramified at only one prime is contained in an S4 extension.

History Matching And Prediction Of A Polymer Flood Pilot In Heavy Oil Reservoir On Alaska North Slope, Xindan Wang

Engineering

The first-ever polymer flood pilot to enhance heavy oil recovery on Alaska North Slope is ongoing. After more than 3 years of polymer injection, significant benefit has been observed from the decrease in water cut from 65% to less than 15% in the project producers. The primary objective of this study is to develop a robust history-matched reservoir simulation model capable of predicting future polymer flood performance. In this work, the reservoir simulation model has been developed based on the geological model and available reservoir and fluid data. In particular, four high transmissibility strips were introduced to connect the injector-producer …

Air Quality And Mental Health: Evidence, Challenges And Future Directions, K Bhui, J Newbury, R Latham, M Ucci, Z Nasar, B Turner, C O'Leary, Hl Fisher, E Marczylo, P Douglas, S Stansfeld, S Jackson, S Tyrrel, A Rzhetsky, R Kinnersley, P Kumar, C Duchaine, F Coulon

School of Biomedical Sciences

No abstract provided.