Digital Commons Network^™

Youth Program Fy2024 Evaluation Report December 2024, Madhawa Palihapitiya, Karina Zeferino

Massachusetts Office of Public Collaboration Publications

The Youth Conflict Resolution & Restorative Practices Program (Youth Program or Program), administered by the Massachusetts Office of Public Collaboration (MOPC) in collaboration with 10 community mediation centers (Centers), aims to reduce youth conflict and/or violence through a social and emotional learning (SEL) and positive youth development framework. This approach leverages mediation and restorative practices to equip youth with essential SEL skills and improve school climate. This FY2024 program evaluation report assesses the Youth Program’s effectiveness across multiple domains, including school climate, student SEL competencies, engagement/awareness, training, and resources.

Antibiotic Resistance Of Laboratory E. Coli Strains, Alexis H. Hart

Honors Projects

Antibiotic resistance is an ongoing global health crisis. The prevalence and distribution of antibiotic resistance in environmental microbial communities have become climactic areas of investigation due to their far-reaching implications for ecosystem health, human well-being, and the sustainability of antimicrobial efficacy.

Forecasting Crime Rates Utilizing Machine Learning And Economic Indicators, Owen Miller

Honors Projects

Abstract: The following project utilized the correlation between economic indicators and crime rates to build tree-based machine learning algorithms that predict monthly crime rates in Ohio. The goal of the study was to answer how economic variables could be used in forecasting county level crime rates. A sample of 9 counties were utilized in building regression trees, random forests and evolutionary random forest models. The study concluded that lagged crime rates provided the best predictive ability in forecasting models, while economic variables provided more accuracy to property crime. The study could be furthered by creating models at the department level …

Steps In The Right Direction: The Pursuit Of Walkability Within The United States, Griffin Neuschaefer

Honors Projects

The benefits associated with walkability are well documented and observed across a number of disciplines. Benefits pertaining to the economy, physical and mental health, and safety are clearly associated with walkability and the implementation of walkable design within specific communities. Due to dominant practices pertaining to urban design within the United States and a history of increasingly single-use and low-density zoning, walkability and the use of walking as a form of transportation are rarely utilized to the same extent as similarly developed countries. This paper aims to evaluate the features of walkability related to the aforementioned benefits in order to …

Using Fragments To Uncover Connections Through Call And Response, Resonance, And Dissonance, Mary Garland, Laurinda Brown, Melissa Dunlop, Carol Laidler, Marian Liebmann, Donata Puntil, Artemi Sakellariadis, Jane Speedy

Professional Services

CANI-net (Collaborative Artful Narrative Inquiry Network) has evolved over the last thirty years from being a research center and network at the University of Bristol to holding online monthly “open inquiry space” sessions attended by scholars, educators, and artists around the world. The sessions are flexible, encouraging the presentation of work in progress, ideas just emerging, middling, in a warm, friendly, supportive atmosphere with students and academics and others engaging, collaborating, and offering feedback to one another. Each session usually offers the opportunity for those present to write into the shared space, and to then share that writing. In the …

Enhancement Of Ambient Air Quality Index Forecasting Using Optimized Ensemble Model, Vanitha M

Theses and Dissertations

Forecasting ambient air quality is essential for environmental sustainability and public health, especially in heavily populated regions such as China, India, and the United States where air pollution remains a serious concern. Traditional forecasting models often struggle to accurately represent air quality data because of its complex patterns and nonlinear interactions. To address these challenges and improve forecast performance, this research proposes a comprehensive strategy that integrates parallel heterogeneous ensemble modeling with Bayesian optimization.

The study begins with a seasonal machine learning–based imputation technique (SeasonalMLImpute) designed to handle missing data in meteorological and air quality parameters. This method is evaluated …

When Help Hurts: Workplace Instrumental Support And Employee Emotional Exhaustion Within-Person, Jensine Paoletti-Hatcher, Anthony T. Misisco, Eden B. King

Psychology Faculty Publications and Presentations

The social support paradox describes mixed findings on the effects of social support on well-being. An application of the person-environment fit perspective can address the paradox by reasoning that similar quantities of social support needs and social support supplies should result in optimal well-being outcomes. We integrate a person-environment fit perspective with self-determination theory in an examination of the relationship between workplace instrumental support and emotional exhaustion through a two-week experience sampling method study. Fifty-nine participants responded to questions about desired quantities of work-related help from their colleagues (coworkers and supervisors) and their perceived quantities of work-related help after work …

Deciphering Immune Suppression Mechanisms Of Primary And Metastatic Breast Cancer, Seunghyun Lee

Arts & Sciences Graduate Student Theses and Dissertations

Immune checkpoint blockade (ICB) has revolutionized cancer treatment, receiving FDA approval for various previously incurable cancers. In breast cancer, the combination of pembrolizumab (an anti-PD-1 antibody) with chemotherapy has become the standard-of-care for early-stage (Keynote-522) and advance-stage (Keynote-355) triple-negative breast cancer (TNBC). Unfortunately, over 30% of TNBC patients fail to respond to the combined chemo-immune therapy treatment, and the causes are unknown. Furthermore, ICB has demonstrated poor results in hormone-receptor positive breast cancer. While it is well-established that breast cancer cells can evade immune responses, the specific mechanisms driving immune evasion remain unclear. Thus, deciphering the immune system's role in …

Empowering Veterans For Social Innovation: A Study On Bridging Military Experience And Civilian Impact Through Targeted Educational Programs, Jill H. Wolfe

Masters Projects

Transitioning from military to civilian life poses unique challenges for veterans, including difficulties in leveraging their military-acquired skills for impactful civilian roles. This thesis explores how veterans’ leadership, adaptability, and mission-driven purpose can be harnessed for social innovation—a field requiring systemic thinking and collaborative problem-solving to address complex societal challenges. Through qualitative interviews with veterans and case studies of existing programs like The Mission Continues and Team Rubicon, the study identifies gaps in educational frameworks that prepare veterans for social innovation roles.

Findings reveal that while veterans possess the resilience and strategic capabilities essential for social impact, barriers such as …

Exploring The Factors Involved To Support African American Males' Success In Mathematics During The Early Grades, Elmore Travis Collier

LMU Theses and Dissertations

This study used a mixed methods approach to examine the instructional and social emotional factors that support African American boys’ success during early elementary grades. The study investigated key influences including teacher and parent demographics, student-teacher, and parent-student relationships, building mathematical confidence in students, and approaching math as a long-term investment. It explored how these factors existed within an ecosystem that contributed to positive math outcomes for students by the third grade. The study used surveys and interviews of teachers, parents, and students to describe instructional activities, relationships, and interactions at school and home that supported positive math outcomes. Findings …

Association Of Unmet Social Needs With Disease-Related Outcomes In Pediatric Patients With Sickle Cell Disease, Molly Sonenklar, Sarah Marks, Cerelia Donald, Cecelia Valrie, Wally Smith, India Sisler

School of Medicine Faculty Publications

Background: Social determinants of health (SDoH) are socioeconomic factors that influence health and well-being, though when unmet can greatly contribute to health disparities. Individuals with sickle cell disease (SCD) are at increased risk of mortality, disability, and healthcare utilization. However, there are limited data linking specific social needs with disease outcomes in this population. Therefore, we sought to identify the unmet needs in one institution and their association with healthcare utilization. Methods: Children with SCD and their guardians answered demographic and SDoH questionnaires during routine Sickle Cell Clinic appointments. We defined an unmet social need as any positive answer to …

Adipocyte-Derived Small Extracellular Vesicles Exacerbate Diabetic Ischemic Heart Injury By Promoting Oxidative Stress And Mitochondrial-Mediated Cardiomyocyte Apoptosis, Lu Gan, Jianli Zhao, Peng Yao, Theodore A. Christopher, Bernard Lopez, Wayne B. Lau, Walter Koch, Erhe Gao, Xin-Liang Ma, Yajing Wang

Department of Emergency Medicine Faculty Papers

BACKGROUND: Diabetes increases ischemic heart injury via incompletely understood mechanisms. We recently reported that diabetic adipocytes-derived small extracellular vesicles (sEV) exacerbate myocardial reperfusion (MI/R) injury by promoting cardiomyocyte apoptosis. Combining in vitro mechanistic investigation and in vivo proof-concept demonstration, we determined the underlying molecular mechanism responsible for diabetic sEV-induced cardiomyocyte apoptosis after MI/R.

METHODS AND RESULTS: Adult mice were fed a high-fat diet (HFD) for 12 weeks. sEV were isolated from plasma or epididymal adipose tissue. HFD significantly increased the number and size of plasma- and adipocyte-derived sEV. Intramyocardial injection of an equal number of diabetic plasma sEV in nondiabetic …

How Should Scientists Act? Assessing Public Perceptions Of Scientists And Scientific Practices And Their Implications For Science Communication, Thomas G. Safford, Emily H. Whitmore

Faculty Publications

Is how science is conducted legitimate? Are scientists trustworthy? Whether the public answers “yes” to these questions is critical for science communicators. We explore how social factors affect public perceptions of the practice of science, and then test how those beliefs relate to views about how scientists engage with the public and policy making. Our results show that political ideology and religiosity affect these views. However, more importantly, respondents’ concerns about the integrity of the scientific process are the strongest predictor of views about scientists’ behavior, providing a focus area for future communication efforts in support of science-based decision making.

12.09.2024 Orsp Connect, Liz Williamson

ORED Newsletter

Employee Profiles

In Person Account Reconciliation and Tableau Training

NSF Proposals with Consultant or Professional Services

Ud In The News Nov. 30-Dec. 6, University Of Dayton

News Releases

National media highlighted UD engineering research and Charles Russo's legal expertise. Local media featured an engineering student's work with United Rehabilitation Services to help a local teen learn to handle everyday tasks.

Latinas In Law Enforcement: Tokenism, Barriers And Changes Along The Narrow Bridge To Promotion, Saturnino Velazquez

Theses and Dissertations from DePaul University

The purpose of this qualitative study was to better understand and analyze themes and patterns shared among the lived experiences of 12 female Latina Law Enforcement Officers (LEOs) in male-dominated police departments in the Midwest (Illinois and Minnesota). The researcher chose to adopt a basic interpretive qualitative research methodology for this study because it provides a flexible and useful research tool, and provided a broader approach to interpreting meaning from rich and detailed data, yet complex, and account of semi-structured interviews that served as a data collection instrument. This study was guided by the theoretical framework of Kanter’s research on …

The Free Press Vol. 56, Issue 7, 12-09-2024, Chris Tiner, Cayley Bowman

Free Press, The

Spotlight on USM Neighbors--Promise Scholar Ornaments--Student Election Talk--Why You Should Have a Signature--Practicing Rest--A Night at the Opera--Goat's Milk and Cookies--Just Keep Running

A Multifactorial Fall Prevention Program, Virale Patel, Zeida Gutierrez

Fall 2024 OTD Capstone Symposium

Falls among older adults are a pressing public health concern, leading to significant physical, psychological, and economic consequences. This capstone project aimed to design and implement a multifactorial fall prevention program to address unmet occupational needs and enhance safety and occupational participation among long-term care residents at a skilled nursing facility. The six-week program included targeted weekly sessions focusing on behavior modification, footwear safety, adaptive equipment training, strength and balance exercises, toileting strategies, and environmental modifications. Pre- and post-program assessments utilized the Fall Efficacy Scale International (FES-I) and participant surveys to evaluate changes in confidence, fear of falling, and satisfaction …

Training Staff Members And Caregivers On Utilizing Allen Cognitive Levels To Aid Individuals Living With Alzheimer's And Dementia To Maintain Activities Of Daily Living, Kristy Boyd, Cassandra Nelson, Jennifer Summers

Fall 2024 OTD Capstone Symposium

This capstone project is about training staff members and caregivers on utilizing the Allen's cognitive levels to aid individuals living with Alzheimer's and dementia to maintain their activities of daily living by creating a program that consists of modules, physical demonstration, and a deliverable for staff members and caregivers as well as therapeutic activities and sensory regulation activities for the participants.

Itaconate Transporter Slc13a3 Impairs Tumor Immunity Via Endowing Ferroptosis Resistance, Heng Lin, Kole Tison, Yuheng Du, Paul Kirchhoff, Chan Kim, Weichao Wang, Hannah Yang, Michael Pitter, Jiali Yu, Peng Liao, Jiajia Zhou, Linda Vatan, Sara Grove, Shuang Wei, Thomas Vigil, Yatrik M Shah, Richard Mortensen, Ilona Kryczek, Lana Garmire, Jwala P Sivaccumar, Ashwin Kumar Ramesh, Ningyan Zhang, Zhiqiang An, Shaomeng Wang, Weiping Zou

The Brown Foundation: Institute of Molecular Medicine

Immune checkpoint blockade (ICB) triggers tumor ferroptosis. However, most patients are unresponsive to ICB. Tumors might evade ferroptosis in the tumor microenvironment (TME). Here, we discover SLC13A3 is an itaconate transporter in tumor cells and endows tumor ferroptosis resistance, diminishing tumor immunity and ICB efficacy. Mechanistically, tumor cells uptake itaconate via SLC13A3 from tumor-associated macrophages (TAMs), thereby activating the NRF2-SLC7A11 pathway and escaping from immune-mediated ferroptosis. Structural modeling and molecular docking analysis identify a functional inhibitor for SLC13A3 (SLC13A3i). Deletion of ACOD1 (an essential enzyme for itaconate synthesis) in macrophages, genetic ablation of SLC13A3 in tumors, or treatment with SLC13A3i …

Latinas In Law Enforcement: Tokenism, Barriers And Changes Along The Narrow Bridge To Promotion, Saturnino Velazquez

College of Education Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this qualitative study was to better understand and analyze themes and patterns shared among the lived experiences of 12 female Latina Law Enforcement Officers (LEOs) in male-dominated police departments in the Midwest (Illinois and Minnesota). The researcher chose to adopt a basic interpretive qualitative research methodology for this study because it provides a flexible and useful research tool, and provided a broader approach to interpreting meaning from rich and detailed data, yet complex, and account of semi-structured interviews that served as a data collection instrument. This study was guided by the theoretical framework of Kanter’s research on …

Deputy Sheriffs’ Experience With Inmate Suicide, Tiffany Buco

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

Deputy sheriffs working in correctional facilities are responsible for enforcing rules and regulations of the facility, supervising inmates, ensuring security, and preventing inmates from escaping. The purpose of this qualitative phenomenological study was to explore the lived experiences of deputy sheriffs experiencing an inmate’s death by suicide. The sample for this study consisted of six deputy sheriffs who had been a deputy sheriff for at least 3 years and experienced an inmate suicide. The theoretical foundation applied to this study is the personal construct theory because it requires constructs that are used to make sense of people’s experiences, in this …

Sd-Weat: Towards Robustly Measuring Bias In Input Embeddings For Artificial Intelligence Language Models, Magnus Gray

Theses and Dissertations

Artificial intelligence (AI) is rapidly transforming industries and markets, from healthcare to entertainment, revolutionizing decision-making processes. However, as AI grow more influential, they also risk amplifying existing biases, potentially leading to harmful consequences. Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs), such as GPT-4 and Llama, have heightened concerns about bias in natural language processing (NLP) tasks, driving the need for robust methods to detect and mitigate bias. Current approaches, such as the Word Embedding Association Test (WEAT) and its sentence-level extension the Sentence Encoder Association Test (SEAT) often fall short in capturing the nuances of biases in the input embeddings …

Reading Law's Great Unread: Qualitative Computational Methods, Artificial Intelligence And The New Empirical Legal Research, Simon Wallace

PhD Dissertations

How will new computational technologies change legal research and our visions of what law is? Inspired by the work of digital humanists, Bourdieu, and sociologists of literature, this dissertation explores how the methods of “distant reading” can be used to develop new classes of critical insights about law. After situating the project theoretically, this dissertation reports on a series of new computational studies about Canadian law. Chapter 1 measures Canadian statutory and regulatory law, showing that law has grown unevenly over the past decade and a half. Chapter 2 uses new artificial intelligence to transcribe and analyze Supreme Court of …

Bowen’S Disease Mimicking Lichen Simplex Chronicus In A 56-Year-Old Filipino Man: A Case Report, Cynthia Angela Karim, Elisabeth Ryan, Reynaldo Ugalde

Journal of General - Procedural Dermatology and Venereology Indonesia

Background: Bowen's disease (BD) is a chronic skin condition presenting clinically as erythematous plaques with scales on sun-exposed areas. BD is generally regarded as a squamous cell carcinoma (SCC) in situ. In contrast, lichen simplex chronicus (LSC), also known as neurodermatitis, is a chronic skin disorder characterized by extreme pruritus. In LSC, lichenified plaques form primarily on accessible body parts due to repeated scratching or rubbing.

Case Illustration: A 56-year-old male presented with a solitary chronic plaque with a central ulcer and erosions on his left upper thigh. Dermoscopy findings were glomerular vessels and a scaly surface, which are …

Algorithmic Reconstruction Of High-Fidelity Synthetic Sird Data, Dylan Mack

Electrical and Systems Engineering Undergraduate Student Research

During infectious disease outbreaks, epidemiologists are faced with problems similar to those of state estimation. Often, only population-level measures of the outbreak are available, such as infection counts per week or test positivity rates. However, these aggregate statistics yield little insight into the individual-level dynamics of an epidemic. Further, empirical data does not directly measure transmission network structure and producing this information via contact tracing is extremely resource-intensive and scales poorly. In this poster, I present an algorithm that produces synthetic, individual-level disease state measurements that both obey the mechanics of an SIRD model and, in aggregate, match empirical infection …

Mems 411: Electrostatic Precipitator Design For Washu Racing Composites Team, Robert J. Wild, Takato Muro, Jackson Ford, David Wiggin

Mechanical Engineering Design Project Class

The objective of this paper is to develop an effective method to remove carbon fiber particulates from the air in the WashU Racing garage using electrostatic precipitation.

Mems 411: Talking Goniometer, Jeffrey Reinhold, Matthew Ren, Corin Riahi, Moises Rodriguez

Mechanical Engineering Design Project Class

Our project is about designing a goniometer that will aid Rachel Apter, an occupational therapy graduate student, more easily determine the angles created by limbs bending about a joint. A goniometer is essentially a protractor designed to affix its base arm to a stationary limb and it’s rotating arm to a moving limb. The moving arm follows the moving limb, measuring the coupled limb’s range of motion. The main complaint centering around goniometers is that they are hard to read due to the small tick marks that indicate the angle. To fix this problem, the goniometer will be edited to …

Mems 411: The Ball Bearing Sorter Group N, Jack Zhao, Anri Cifuentes, Shawn Xiong, Richard Li

Mechanical Engineering Design Project Class

The challenge was to design and develop an automated device capable of sorting and packaging six types of ball bearings—varying in size (1/4 inch and 1/2 inch) and material (stainless steel, brass, and nylon). The device needed to meet strict performance and design constraints, including fitting within a compact 20x20x20-inch footprint, weighing no more than 15 pounds, and sorting bearings with high speed and accuracy.

This problem represents a practical scenario in automated manufacturing, where efficient and precise sorting is crucial for streamlining assembly line operations. The solution required integrating innovative engineering mechanisms, such as size differentiation, material separation, and …

Mems 411: Mailbox Assistant, Peter Scholl, Benjamin Cortes, Garbiel Arcas, Colin Zeiss

Mechanical Engineering Design Project Class

Oftentimes elderly people struggle with reaching into their curbside mailbox from their car, especially if the mail is pushed all the way to the back. With the Mailbox Assistant, sore shoulders can be saved through a drawer that slides out from the mailbox. This modification can be made to any mailbox without altering the outside appearance thus keeping it within HOA standards.