Digital Commons Network^™

The Impact Of Performance Based Funding On Institutional Financial Priorities In Public Two-Year And Four-Year Institutions, Ebony T. Spearman

Master's Theses and Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation examines the impact of performance-based funding (PBF) policies on institutional financial priorities at 2-and 4-year colleges and universities. PBF is a policy mechanism used by states to incentivize higher education institutions to achieve specific performance outcomes, such as increased graduation and retention rates, by tying a portion of institutional funding to these outcomes. This research aims to determine the efficacy of PBF policies on institutional change and outcomes. More specifically, this research seeks to find the extent to which colleges and universities subjected to PBF policies change their financial priorities and how, if at all, these changes impact …

Atg11 And Atg9 Interaction In Selective Autophagy, Chimi Dolker Sherpa

Master's Theses and Doctoral Dissertations

Selective autophagy, induced by cellular stresses, degrades/recycles a specific cargo. Ithelps prevent diseases like Parkinson’s, Huntington's, cancer, and bacterial infections. It involves the formation of an autophagosome, a double-membrane vesicle that takes the cargo to the vacuole/lysosome for degradation. Atg11, the central organizer of selective autophagy, acts as a scaffold protein, interacting with Atg9, Atg1 and other Atg proteins. Our research focuses on finding mutations in Atg11 that specifically disrupt its interaction with Atg9 without affecting its dimerization or interaction with Atg1. We targeted residues 455-535 of Atg11 as a putative Atg9 interaction site, performing mutagenesis on four key residues …

Exploring The Effects Of Interviewer Body Language Availability During A Videoconference Behavioral Health Interview, Efthymia Orkopoulou

Master's Theses and Doctoral Dissertations

This experiment sought to explore whether an interviewer’s body language availability would have any effects on participants’ interactional engagement levels, positivity-negativity of interaction, and their nonverbal synchrony. Six participants answered questions about their well-being during a Zoom interview. Participants were exposed to three Near and three Far video framing conditions alternating every 10 min. Results showed that body language availability did not have reliable effects on the examined nonverbal communication indices. Time, however, did have some significant and close-to-significant effects on certain variables. Treatment reversal graphs showed that body language availability may reliably impact some participants’ responding. However, the rarity …

Causes Of Police Officer Career Apprehension Following George Floyd, Michael T. Rossler, Charles Scheer

Faculty Publications - Criminal Justice Sciences

Police workforce retention has become a persistent managerial concern. The public response to recent events of police misconduct have fueled the perception that police may be seeking other career paths following the murder of George Floyd in 2020. Despite growing evidence, current research has been unable to ascertain what conditions may prompt officers to voluntarily separate from police work following Floyd’s murder, or whether the impact varies across demographic groups. Drawing upon a survey of over 600 police officers across eight police departments in the United States, the current inquiry examines what percent of officers reported reconsidering their career following …

The Building Leader’S Role In Developing And Supporting Meaningful Student Voice At The High School Level, Beth Grzelak-Lee

Master's Theses and Doctoral Dissertations

School leaders are the mediators of a school’s culture. At the high school level, students can contribute to, and even co-construct, their schooling experience with school leaders. Yet there is not a significant literature regarding how high-school building leaders develop and support student voice. Through the research method of semi-structured interviews with three high school principals in a district committed to elevating student voice, this study sought to identify the key behaviors, attitudes, and language used by a school leader working to develop and support student voice as an integral part of the high school experience. Additionally, it sought to …

Perceptions Of School Shooters: How The Race Of A School Shooter And His Video Game Playing Habits Influence Observers’ Explanatory Attributions About His Crime, Brian Beaupre

Master's Theses and Doctoral Dissertations

The current experiment is an exploration of how people arrive at causal explanations for instances of mass school shootings in the United States. Specifically, this study utilized a fictitious shooter vignette approach with a 2 (White vs. Black shooter) x 2 (shooter played violent vs. nonviolent video games) between-subject ANOVA to determine if these variables would differentially influence the participants’ levels of agreement with various causal attributions about why a mass shooter would engage in such an act of violence. In particular, this study explored participants’ utilization of internal (e.g., innate characteristics like the shooter’s race or gender) or external …

In A Hell Of Our Own Creation: Spatial Context And The Wehrmacht’S Genocidal War In Eastern Europe, 1941–1943, Charles Joseph Calcaterra

Master's Theses and Doctoral Dissertations

A multitude of social, ideological, psychological, and environmental factors encouraged German servicemen to willingly commit atrocities in Eastern Europe during the Second World War. How should historians contextualize which factors held greater influence over servicemen deployed to different sectors of the vast Eastern Front? Charles Calcaterra highlights soldiers’ responses to their surrounding environments—the landscape of Eastern Europe—to explain why frontline divisions killed and destroyed indiscriminately in accessory to the Holocaust while rearguard personnel socially justified roundups, executions, and the horrid maltreatment of Red Army prisoners of war. Through the lens of military geography, the spatial contexts that fostered frontline units’ …

Trigger Events And Leadership: Crucible Moments In Leadership, Timothy M. Authier

Master's Theses and Doctoral Dissertations

Being and becoming an educational leader is a process that engages multiple levels of challenge, training, processing, and understanding. The many demands placed on school administrators create many challenges and put a great deal of adversity in the pathway of administrators. The training process involving graduate degrees in educational leadership attempts to support aspiring principals and district leaders by applying technical skills and practices. However, the challenges and adversity that arise in education consistently cause other factors, of which administrators may have some awareness but need more official training and teaching on navigating. Thus, topics frequently discussed, such as emotional …

Family Context And Executive Functioning In Preschool-Age Children, Kristin Aho

Master's Theses and Doctoral Dissertations

Executive functioning is predictive of school readiness, successful life endeavors, and other positive outcomes. The literature frequently explores how child executive functions are associated with characteristics of mother-child interactions as well as adverse environmental conditions such as poverty and chronic stress. Fewer studies, however, have taken a more nuanced approach to understanding how features of the immediate environment, such as family context, help or hinder the development of executive functions in young children. To address this gap, the current study explored how aspects of family context are associated with executive performance in a sample of preschool-age children. Specifically, the study …

'We' Instead Of 'Me': How Buen Vivir Indigenous Cosmopraxes Allow Us To Conceive Security Differently And Face Insecurities Together, Juliano Cortinhas, Yara Martinelli, Ricardo Barbosa

Student Publications [Scholarly]

Although Critical Security Studies (CSS) has done much to advance security debates, some shortcomings remain. Its excessive focus on the individual - which we term 'me' - reduces CSS' capacity to propose solutions to current global security problems such as pandemics and climate change. This paper contributes to the emerging scholarship on the potential of relational ontologies in Security Studies by introducing Buen Vivir Indigenous cosmopraxes into the debate. Indigenous cosmopraxes such as Sumak Kawsay, Suma Qamaña, and Teko Kavi, we argue, can inform CSS by providing alternative considerations to the pluriverse of ideas that address security crises. These cosmopraxes, …

Modeling Apparent Pb Loss In Zircon U-Pb Geochronology, Glenn R. Sharman, Matthew A. Malkowski

Geosciences Faculty Publications and Presentations

The loss of radiogenic Pb from zircon is known to be a major factor that can cause inaccuracy in the U–Pb geochronological system; hence, there is a need to better characterize the distribution of Pb loss in natural samples. Treatment of zircon by chemical abrasion (CA) has become standard practice in isotope dilution–thermal ionization mass spectrometry (ID-TIMS), but CA is much less commonly employed prior to in situ analysis via laser ablation–inductively coupled plasma–mass spectrometry (LA-ICP-MS) or secondary ionization mass spectrometry (SIMS). Differentiating the effects of low levels of Pb loss in Phanerozoic zircon with relatively low-precision in situ U–Pb …

Grappling With Real Property Supremacy In Us Urban Climate Finance, Julia Wagner, Mark Kear, Sarah Knuth, Sahar Zavareh Hofmann, Zac E. Taylor

Student Publications [Scholarly]

In US cities, drives to secure property value against climate risks have become a preoccupation for mainstream climate finance. This real property bias sidelines non-owners and inhabitants of historically marginalized housing types, limiting their capacity to prepare for and recover from climate change events. In this intervention, we survey major pathways of existing climate finance, before turning to emerging trends for residential ‘climate-proofing,’ retrofitting efforts that bring climate finance ‘home’ to the building level. Building on the concept of ‘real property supremacy,’ we demonstrate how resourcing climate response is limited by the privileging of real property in the structure and …

Understanding The Impact Of A Short-Term Study Away Course On The Leadership Development Of Women Graduate Students, Allison Boone

Master's Theses and Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation explores the transformative impact of short-term study away courses on women's leadership development in graduate education. Through a qualitative, case study approach, it investigates the experiences of women graduate students (n = 8) participating in an all-women study away course, aiming to uncover the factors that contribute most significantly to their learning and leadership growth. The study develops a conceptual model integrating theories of intersectionality, leadership identity development, and transformative learning, providing a comprehensive framework for understanding the complex interplay of personal and intersectional identities in leadership development. Findings reveal the profound influence of immersive learning experiences, highlighting …

A Prototype Application For The Measurement Of Data Breach Event Intensity, James Palazzolo

Master's Theses and Doctoral Dissertations

The data breach phenomenon is not new. People have valued information, its protection, and its security for centuries. A data breach is the loss of control over one’s information. In contemporary society (circa 2024), a data breach can occur in several ways: through accidental disclosure, negligence, or malicious action. Likewise, the study of the data breach phenomenon is not new. As with other studies, this research effort seeks to expand the current body of knowledge concerning data breaches. However, unlike previous research, we adopt a novel approach to further our understanding of the phenomenon. By employing topological and phenomenological thinking, …

Understanding Primary Care Physician Perspectives On The Diagnosis And Management Of Non-Alcoholic Fatty Liver Disease: A Qualitative Study, Natalia I Heredia, Jemima C John, Sonia Singh, Jessica P Hwang, Larkin L Strong, Maya Balakrishnan, Lorna H Mcneill

Faculty, Staff and Students Publications

Primary care physicians (PCPs) are well suited to manage patients with non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD), but the limited, existing research suggests inadequate knowledge about the natural history, diagnostic methods, and management of NAFLD. The purpose of this qualitative study is to further understand the knowledge and practices for the diagnosis and management of NAFLD among PCPs. We conducted in-depth interviews with PCPs in the Greater Houston area, addressing current clinical practices used for diagnosing and managing NAFLD, as well as the perceptions of the PCPs regarding the burden of NAFLD on patients. We recorded interviews, transcribed them, coded transcripts, …

Profile Of Caregiving Activities And Association With Physical Health Among Dementia Spousal Caregivers, Jinmyoung Cho, Laura P Sands, Alan B Stevens, Heather G Allore, Molly J Horstman

Faculty, Staff and Students Publications

Background and objectives: This study aims to identify patterns of caregiving intensity and assess associations between caregiving intensity and multidimensional physical health indicators and health behaviors among spousal caregivers of persons with Alzheimer's disease and related dementia.

Research design and methods: Using data from 152 spousal caregivers aged 65 and older, the intensity of their caregiving experience was measured as the number and frequency of health- and medical-related helping activities for their care recipient. Multidimensional health indicators included self-reported fatigue, sleep disturbance, physical functioning, pain interference, general health, and the number of chronic conditions from the electronic health records. Self-reported …

Characteristics And Contributing Factors Of Diagnostic Error In Surgery: Analysis Of Closed Medico-Legal Cases And Complaints In Canada, Janice L Kwan, Lisa A Calder, Cara L Bowman, Anna Macintyre, Richard Mimeault, Liisa Honey, Cynthia Dunn, Gary Garber, Hardeep Singh

Faculty, Staff and Students Publications

Background: Diagnostic errors lead to patient harm; however, most research has been conducted in nonsurgical disciplines. We sought to characterize diagnostic error in the pre-, intra-, and postoperative surgical phases, describe their contributing factors, and quantify their impact related to patient harm.

Methods: We performed a retrospective analysis of closed medico-legal cases and complaints using a database representing more than 95% of all Canadian physicians. We included cases if they involved a legal action or complaint that closed between 2014 and 2018 and involved a diagnostic error assigned by peer expert review to a surgeon.

Results: We identified 387 surgical …

Agem Topic Supplement: Strategies For Inclusion Of Diverse Older Adults In Emergency Medicine Research, Michelle I Suh, Annika R Bhananker, Debra F Tomasino, Kayla Carpenter, Ula Hwang, Christopher R Carpenter, Dowin Boatright, Cassandra Bradby, Jeffrey Caterino, Andrea Gilmore-Bykovskyi, Elizabeth M Goldberg, Maura Kennedy, Shan W Liu, Edgardo Ordonez, Tony Rosen, Margaret E Samuels-Kalow, Manish Shah, Sumin Yoon, Anita N Chary

Faculty, Staff and Students Publications

No abstract provided.

Designing A Best Possible Caregiver History To Facilitate Disposition Planning For Older Adults In Emergency Departments, Karen De Sola-Smith, Matthew Growdon, Anita N Chary, Jennifer D Portz, Kenneth Lam

Faculty, Staff and Students Publications

Introduction: Detailed information about caregivers is crucial for planning disposition from emergency departments (EDs), but it is unclear what specific information is useful for ED clinicians and how that information should be presented.

Methods: We used a Design Thinking approach to develop a standardized format-which we call a "Best Possible Caregiver History" (BPCH)-for displaying useful caregiver information to ED clinicians. The key steps of this approach are needfinding, followed by iterative cycles of ideation, rapid prototyping, and testing. For needfinding, we used semi-structured interviews of four ED clinicians on current practices for discovering and documenting caregiver information. For ideation and …

Family Medicine Clerkship Directors' Remediation Of Faculty With Mistreatment Concerns: Results From A Cera Clerkship Directors Survey, William Y Huang, Yuanyuan Zhou, Jonnae Atkinson, Kenneth Barning, Misbah Keen, Joel Purkiss

Faculty, Staff and Students Publications

Introduction: Little is known about how frequently family medicine (FM) clerkship directors remediate faculty with student mistreatment concerns and their comfort level in performing the remediations. In this exploratory study, we investigated factors associated with the number of faculty remediated for student mistreatment concerns by FM clerkship directors and the comfort level of FM clerkship directors in remediating these faculty.

Methods: Data were collected as part of the 2022 Council of Academic Family Medicine Educational Research Alliance (CERA) survey of FM clerkship directors. FM clerkship directors provided responses on how frequently they remediated faculty with mistreatment concerns and their comfort …

Effects Of Blood Flow Restriction Resistance Training On Autonomic And Endothelial Function In Persons With Parkinson's Disease, Annie Bane, Lorraine Wilson, Jill Jumper, Lindsay Spindler, Pricilla Wyatt, Darryn Willoughby

Faculty, Staff and Students Publications

Background: Autonomic dysfunction precedes endothelial dysfunction in Parkinson's disease (PD) and causes blood pressure and circulation abnormalities that are highly disruptive to one's quality of life. While exercise interventions have proven helpful for motor symptoms of PD, improving associated non-motor symptoms is limited. Low-intensity resistance training with blood flow restriction (LIRT-BFR) improves autonomic dysfunction in non-PD patients and high-intensity resistance training (HIRT) is recommended for motor symptom improvements for people with PD (PwPD).

Objective: To determine the effects of LIRT-BFR and HIRT on homocysteine and autonomic and endothelial function in PwPD and to determine the hemodynamic loads during LIRT-BFR and …

Growing Up Sustainable? Politics Of Race And Youth In Urbanplan, Copenhagen, Max Ritts, Rebecca Rutt

Geography

This paper considers how racialized youth in Denmark negotiate sustainability amid contexts marked by intersecting forms of economic restructuring, progressive neoliberalism, white ethno-nationalism, and green urban planning. Urbanplan is a low-income, notoriously “troubled” Copenhagen neighborhood where we conducted fieldwork for 7 months (2019-2020) with fifteen male youth, aged 17-21. Using ethnography, policy reviews, and interviews with city social workers, we explore how intimate experiences of nature, group-identity, and place attachment here relate to and depart from the structural forces actively reshaping the neighborhood. Our analysis combines Cindi Katz's intersectional political economy approach with recent work on green gentrification, Critical Utopian …

Amazonia In Motion: Changing Politics, Development Strategies, Peoples, Landscapes And Livelihoods, Susanna Hecht, Marianne Schmink, Rebecca Neaera Abers, Eduardo Assad, Denise Bebbington, Eduardo Brodizio, Francisco De Assis Costa, Ana María Calisto Durán, Philip Fearnside, Rachael Garrett, Sebastian Heilpern, David Mcgrath, Gustavo Oliveira, Henrique Pereira, Miguel Pinedo-Vazquez

Geography

We review the often-invisible powerful processes that drive social and ecological change in Amazonia, and the diverse peoples who inhabit its landscapes. It explores large-scale development ideologies of modernization, and the policy tools that were deployed to carry them out. Outlining general periods of macro policy shifts, we show the evolution of the framework for today’s complex interactions between large-scale agroindustry, mining, and hydrocarbons, and diverse small-scale livelihoods, as well as the clandestine and illicit economies of land grabbing, gold, coca and timber, and their operation in globalized and regional economies. While Pan-Amazonian governments have oscillated between authoritarian and democratic …

Twenty Years Of Epithelial-Mesenchymal Transition: A State Of The Field From Temtia X, Pierre Savagner, Thomas Brabletz, Chonghui Cheng, Christine Gilles, Tian Hong, Myriam Polette, Guojun Sheng, Marc P Stemmler, Erik W Thompson

Faculty, Staff and Students Publications

This report summarizes the 10th biennial meeting of The Epithelial Mesenchymal Transition International Association (TEMTIA), that took place in Paris on November 7-10, 2022. It provides a short but comprehensive introduction to the presentations and discussions that took place during the 3-day meeting. Similarly to previous TEMTIA meetings, TEMTIA X reviewed the most recent aspects of the epithelial-mesenchymal transition (EMT), a cellular process involved during distinct stages of development but also during wound healing and fibrosis to some degree. EMT has also been associated at various levels during tumor cell progression and metastasis. The meeting emphasized the intermediate stages of …

Physical Violence And Aggression In Parkinson's Disease: A Systematic Review, Melissa B Jones, Lakeshia Gibson, Malena Gimenez-Zapiola, Ana Guerra, Gursimrat Bhatti, Dakota Broadway, Juliann Tea, Aksa Prasad, Rachel Gates, Elizabeth Hinton, Ricardo E Jorge, Laura Marsh

Faculty, Staff and Students Publications

Background: Physical violence and aggression (PVA), defined as behaviors with the potential to cause bodily injury, are unfortunate risks in the management of all-cause neurodegenerative dementias. While dementia in Parkinson's disease (PD) may not be evident for many years after clinical onset, neuropsychiatric disturbances occur at all stages of the disease. At issue is whether PVA in PD is associated with clinical factors that can be targets for prevention and management in the absence of a prevailing dementia syndrome.

Objective: This systematic review examined the extent to which PVA in PD without dementia is a clinically significant concern and whether …

Emulating A Randomized Clinical Trial With Real-World Data To Evaluate The Effect Of Antidepressant Use In Ptsd Patients With High Suicide Risk, Oshin Miranda, Xiguang Qi, M Daniel Brannock, Ryan Whitworth, Thomas Kosten, Neal David Ryan, Gretchen L Haas, Levent Kirisci, Lirong Wang

Faculty, Staff and Students Publications

INTRODUCTION: Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) entails behavioral changes with increased risk of suicide, and there is no consensus on the preferred antidepressants for treatment of those PTSD patients who are at elevated risk for suicide.

METHODS: We conducted a clinical trial emulation study comparing suicide-related events (SREs) among those patients' initiating antidepressants within 60 days after a qualifying SRE. Patients were followed from initiation of antidepressant until any of the following: treatment cessation, switching, death, or loss to follow-up. The outcome is a new onset of an SRE.

RESULTS: Citalopram exhibited a significantly fewer case with new SREs compared to …

Self-Rectifying Magnetoelectric Metamaterials For Remote Neural Stimulation And Motor Function Restoration, Joshua C Chen, Gauri Bhave, Fatima Alrashdan, Abdeali Dhuliyawalla, Katie J Hogan, Antonios G Mikos, Jacob T Robinson

Faculty, Staff and Students Publications

Magnetoelectric materials convert magnetic fields into electric fields. These materials are often used in wireless electronic and biomedical applications. For example, magnetoelectrics could enable the remote stimulation of neural tissue, but the optimal resonance frequencies are typically too high to stimulate neural activity. Here we describe a self-rectifying magnetoelectric metamaterial for a precisely timed neural stimulation. This metamaterial relies on nonlinear charge transport across semiconductor layers that allow the material to generate a steady bias voltage in the presence of an alternating magnetic field. We generate arbitrary pulse sequences with time-averaged voltage biases in excess of 2 V. As a …

The Maternal Gut Microbiome In Pregnancy: Implications For The Developing Immune System, Omry Koren, Liza Konnikova, Petter Brodin, Indira U Mysorekar, Maria Carmen Collado

Faculty, Staff and Students Publications

The gut microbiome has important roles in host metabolism and immunity, and microbial dysbiosis affects human physiology and health. Maternal immunity and microbial metabolites during pregnancy, microbial transfer during birth, and transfer of immune factors, microorganisms and metabolites via breastfeeding provide critical sources of early-life microbial and immune training, with important consequences for human health. Only a few studies have directly examined the interactions between the gut microbiome and the immune system during pregnancy, and the subsequent effect on offspring development. In this Review, we aim to describe how the maternal microbiome shapes overall pregnancy-associated maternal, fetal and early neonatal …

The Multigenerational Legacy Of Diabetes And Illness Perception: Influence On Older Adult’S Stigma, Melissa Scollan-Koliopoulos, Donna Naturale, Brynn Mahurter, Sara Curran, Ryan J. Koliopoulos

Nursing Faculty Publications

There is not enough information regarding the impact of stigma associated with a. diagnosis of diabetes in aging older adults. Perceptions of diabetes are passed down generationally and may be influenced by mainstream societal perceptions at the time the perception is shaped. This is known as a multigenerational legacy of diabetes for those with whom the perceptions are shaped within families when a hereditarily predisposed condition occurs. In this study, participants over the age of (n = 88) 60 years old were administered measures of illness perception with social stigma items added to the social consequences domain. Participants were also …

Advances In Nanoprobes For Molecular Mri Of Alzheimer’S Disease, Parag Parekh, Andrew A Badachhape, Eric A Tanifum, Ananth V Annapragada, Ketan B Ghaghada

Faculty, Staff and Students Publications

Alzheimer's disease is the most common cause of dementia and a leading cause of mortality in the elderly population. Diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease has traditionally relied on evaluation of clinical symptoms for cognitive impairment with a definitive diagnosis requiring post-mortem demonstration of neuropathology. However, advances in disease pathogenesis have revealed that patients exhibit Alzheimer's disease pathology several decades before the manifestation of clinical symptoms. Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) plays an important role in the management of patients with Alzheimer's disease. The clinical availability of molecular MRI (mMRI) contrast agents can revolutionize the diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease. In this article, we …