Digital Commons Network^™

Openings, 2025, Trinity Christian College

Openings

Literary Arts: Where I'm From by Kaylee Santiago - 2 / Desk by Luke Rotman - 3 / A Final Word by Njoki Mukuria - 8 / there's no going back by Sam Nonhof - 9 / Oranges by ren amador - 11 / DESTINY vs. AGENCY by Chase Hadley - 13 / Freely Give, Freely Receive by Mia Musick - 17 / Like a Child by Kaylee M. Santiago - 20 / The Poetry of the Body by John Terpstra - 21 / Carl's Secret by Kaylee M. Santiago - 23 / My Father's Hair by John Terpstra - …

In Support Of Free Speech On Food Production, Nicole Ligon

Scholarly Works

In May 2024, Florida and Alabama became the first states to ban the production and sale of lab-grown meat. Driven by a desire to protect the traditional agriculture industry, these new laws impose severe penalties on anyone found to have even stored lab-grown meat products in their home. The legislation follows in the footsteps of other laws aimed at offering the traditional agriculture industry additional protections. Florida, Alabama, and eleven other states already have “food disparagement laws” that make it easier to punish critics of traditional agriculture companies. Additionally, six states, including Alabama, currently have laws aimed at stifling undercover …

Copyright, Creativity, And Skill: Authorship And Ai-Assisted Works, Lucas S. Osborn

Scholarly Works

Generative artificial intelligence ("Al") has increasingly become a focal point in legal discussions, raising complex issues across multiple domains, including algorithmic bias, defamation, intellectual property, and privacy. This Article specifically examines the implications of Al-assisted works, with a focus on text-to-image generators, such as Midjourney, that possess the ability to create detailed visual art from simple text prompts. The tools are not, however, limited to simple prompts. Users retain the ability to introduce greater complexity by specifying a host of variables that define the resulting image. Al-assisted art implicates significant legal rights and responsibilities. As to responsibilities: Can the image …

Person-Centered Pluralism About Contract Theory, C. Scott Pryor

Scholarly Works

No abstract provided.

2025-2026 Lynn University Academic Catalog, Lynn University

Academic Catalogs

The 2025-2026 Academic Catalog initially published as a web-only document.

This is a PDF version, created by the Department of Marketing and Communication.

(Updated Dec. 11, 2025.)

Zinc Or Swim: Investigating Zinc Pollution From Restoration Materials, Megan R. Jensik

Honors Undergraduate Theses

Zinc is an essential nutrient, but can be toxic at high concentrations, negatively affecting various biological functions. Gabions are galvanized metals coated in zinc that are used for many human purposes, including coastal restoration efforts attempting to avoid using plastic materials. However, gabions can degrade in marine environments, potentially leaching metal into the water and soil. There is a knowledge gap regarding the occurrence and impacts of zinc pollution in the areas where these gabions are deployed, including the Indian River Lagoon (IRL). To address this, sediment samples were collected from the IRL and analyzed for their physical and chemical …

The Bridge, Volume 22, 2025, Bridgewater State University

the bridge

Editor-in-Chief

Katie Johanson

Managing Editor

Andrew Chermesino

Editors:

Tom Beaudry

Anna Connor

Jayce Elliott

Daniel Manning

Allison Marchand

Kristiana Nogueira

Giana Wigmore

Kaia Young

Faculty Advisor:

Professor Jessica Melendy

Design Advisor:

Professor Alain Blunt

Lead Designer

Vanessa Greaves

Designers

Nia Alvarado-Rodriguez

Robert Barove

Matt Curley

Matthew Fountain

Michelle Green

Grant Hall

Ready, Set, Go: The Race Between The Government, The Constitution, And Racehorses, Erik L. Pedersen

Marquette Sports Law Review

No abstract provided.

Efficient Norms In Formula One, Samuel Cole

Marquette Sports Law Review

No abstract provided.

The Paradox Of Survival: Gendered Food Insecurity, Labor Inequalities, And Coping Strategies During The 2023/4 Drought In Eastern Ethiopia, Meron E. Lemma

Theses and Dissertations--Geography

In drought-prone regions of Eastern Ethiopia, recurring droughts profoundly reshape everyday life in ways that deepen existing gendered inequalities. Drawing on fieldwork conducted in Fedis district, including semi-structured interviews with women, project implementers, and government officials, as well as group discussions with community members, this study explores how women experience, navigate, and resist the gendered impacts of drought. By attending to the sociopolitical dynamics of drought and the development interventions that accompany it, I analyze how these forces restructure labor, land, food systems, and authority in ways that reproduce and exacerbate existing inequalities. Women’s coping strategies, ranging from begging and …

Effect Of Pulsed Electromagnetic Field Therapy On Milk Quality In Organic Dairy Cows, Kayla A. Young

Honors Theses and Capstones

Organic dairy systems are limited when it comes to the use of antibiotics and pharmaceuticals which creates opportunities to explore alternative treatments to promote cow health. Pulsed electromagnetic field therapy (PEMF), a form of electromagnetic stimulation, promotes various types of healing for both animal and human medicine. Our objective was to explore the effect of PEMF on milk yield and composition in organic dairy cows. Mid-lactation Jersey cows (n = 35) of various parities were randomly assigned to 1 of 3 treatments: 1) control (CON; n = 12); no PEMF, 2) once daily PEMF (PEMF1; n = 12), …

Tryptophan Kynurenine Pathway-Based Imaging Agents For Brain Disorders And Oncology-From Bench To Bedside, Erik Stauff, Wenqi Xu, Heidi H. Kecskemethy, Sigrid A. Langhans, Vinay V. R. Kandula, Lauren W. Averill, Xuyi Yue

Jefferson Hospital Staff Papers and Presentations

Tryptophan (Trp)-based radiotracers have excellent potential for imaging many different types of brain pathology because of their involvement with both the serotonergic and kynurenine (KYN) pathways. However, radiotracers specific to the kynurenine metabolism pathway are limited. In addition, historically Trp-based radiopharmaceuticals were synthesized with the short-lived isotope carbon-11. A newer generation of Trp-based imaging agents using the longer half-lived and commercially available isotopes, such as fluorine-18 and iodine-124, are being developed. The newly developed amino acid-based tracers have been demonstrated to have favorable radiochemical and imaging characteristics in pre-clinical studies. However, many barriers still exist in the clinical translation of …

Dynamical Mechanisms Of Neural Computation, Frederick Michael Berl

Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dissertations

The brain is one of the most complex dynamical systems in the universe and despite our everyday familiarity with it, the intricacies of how it functions remain a mystery to us. It is enormously powerful, continuously learning, and able to perform computations flexibly and adapt to novel situations. Although science presently has an understanding of how individual neurons work and a general idea of what the functions of each region in the brain are, how the computations of each neuron are modulated by context and how the various regions work together to produce behavior are unclear. Here, we explore the …

Adaptation Of Learning Dynamics And Feature Representations Via The Neural Kernel, Lianghui Peng

Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dissertations

The ability to learn from experience is essential for both biological and artificial agents. To learn efficiently in complex, high-dimensional environments, agents must generalize strategically from limited data by focusing on features relevant for the task. The generalization strategy, known as inductive bias, shapes the dynamics of learning. Previous works have established the theory of neural tangent kernels that describes the learning dynamics of artificial neural networks. However, a comparable framework for understanding and quantifying inductive bias in biological systems performing behavioral tasks remains underdeveloped. Here, we introduce a neural kernel framework to characterize inductive biases of humans and artificial …

Exploring Squamate Evolution Through Focused Taxonomic And Anatomic Lenses: A Taxon-Character Approach To A Taxon-Character Problem, Dalton Meyer

Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dissertations

Among the living terrestrial vertebrates, the greatest diversity of verifiable species is seenamong the squamates, the group which contains the lizards and snakes. With a global distribution limited only by their general intolerance to long periods of cold temperatures, they are a ubiquitous component of modern ecosystems. Furthermore, over their roughly 180-million-year evolutionary history they have achieved tremendous morphological disparity and a range of body sizes that spans three orders of magnitude. However, our understanding of the origins and early evolution of squamates remains obscured due to persistent conflict in hypotheses generated from morphological and molecular data. This discordance is …

A Second Wave Of Notch Signaling Diversifies The Intestinal Secretory Lineage, Eleanor Zagoren

Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dissertations

The small intestine is well known for its nutrient-absorbing enterocytes; yet equally crucial for homeostasis is a diverse set of secretory cells, all presumed to originate from the same intestinal stem cell. Despite their major roles in intestinal function and health, understanding how the full spectrum of secretory cell types arises remains a longstanding challenge, largely due to their comparative rarity. Here, I investigate the specification of a rare population of small intestinal epithelial cells found in rats and humans but not mice: CFTR high expressers (CHEs). Using pseudotime trajectory analysis of single-cell RNA-sequencing data from rat jejunum, I provide …

Russian Forms: Race, Sex, And The Making Of Russian Literature, Fiona Bell

Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dissertations

This dissertation argues that the elaboration of Russian racial imaginaries was coterminous with the construction of the Russian literary canon and Russian literary theory. Beginning with the global debates concerning the abolition of slavery and serfdom in the 1850s and concluding with the first wave of emigration from the Soviet Union in the 1920s, the dissertation demonstrates how canonical Russian authors—Ivan Turgenev, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Viktor Shklovsky, and others—wrote fiction that, in mobilizing the racial implications of intimacy, kinship, and heredity, articulated arguments about racial difference and the conceptual “fit” of “race” for the Russian Empire. Literary authors make arguments about …

Outside The Workshop: Alternative Spaces Of U.S. Printmaking, 1935–1977, Michelle Donnelly

Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dissertations

The studio, the land, the camp, and the home are vital locations of print production. Yet scholars have overwhelmingly focused on prints made in the workshop, or an institutional facility stocked with specialized equipment and overseen by “master printers.” This dissertation investigates how women artists and artists of color expanded the parameters of printmaking outside the traditional site of the workshop from 1935 to 1977 in the United States. Each spatially organized chapter centers on one artist: David Hammons, Sari Dienes, Matsusaburo “George” Hibi, and Ruth Asawa. All four artists practiced what I call emplaced printmaking: an engagement with the …

Warm Life, Cold Stones: The Effigial Tomb In Late Medieval English Literature, Maia Ruth Béar

Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dissertations

The effigial tomb is one of the defining features of Gothic sacred art. Tombs topped with grand effigies populated the churches, cathedrals, and chapels of late medieval England and many survive to this day. This dissertation explores the encounter with these tombs as represented in the literature of the period, in particular hagiography, romance, and narrative poetry. Although it literally demarcates the boundary between dead and living, the tomb is a powerful site of boundary-breaking in these texts at which the distinctions between life and death, flesh, and natural and artistic bodies are tested and often complicated. I consider various …

Advancing Neuroimaging Brain-Behavior Machine Learning Biomarkers, Brendan Adkinson

Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dissertations

Machine learning models trained on human neuroimaging data are increasingly used as tools for predicting individual behavioral phenotypes and enhancing precision medicine. However, multiple limitations hinder their current scientific and future clinical utility. In this dissertation, I address key challenges surrounding "brain-behavior" predictive model interpretability, generalization, and bias. In Chapters 2 and 3, I show that prevalent feature selection practices overlook features that are meaningful for both prediction and neurobiological interpretation. This suggests that prevailing approaches lead to feature overinterpretation and a misrepresentation of the neurobiological bases of brain-behavior associations. In Chapters 4 and 5, I demonstrate that brain-behavior predictions …

Two Paradigms Of Research And Their Influence On The Study Of Animal Behaviour, David Fraser

General - Animal Cognition and Behavior

Taxonomist Roy Crowson identified a fundamental difference among sciences. What he called “natural history” is exemplified by classical biology; it begins by observing, describing and classifying phenomena in the real world, then seeks patterns and concepts that help to synthesize and explain the observations, and proceeds to measurement and experimentation grounded in that framework. What he called “natural philosophy” is exemplified by classical physics; it postulates fundamental principles or concepts that are thought to apply universally, and the research proceeds more directly to measurement and experimentation directed at these principles or concepts. The study of animal behaviour has been influenced …

Who's Down With Dap? The Relationship Between Teacher Preparation And The Use Of Developmentally Appropriate Practices During Kindergarten Mathematics Instruction, Megan G. Mccarver

Doctor of Education Dissertations

Children’s experiences in kindergarten classrooms occur during a critical period in their development and can have a long-term impact on not only academic abilities but other areas as well, such as social emotional development and socioeconomic status in adulthood. Kindergarten in America has undergone many changes over time, leading teachers to feel torn between meeting rigorous academic standards and addressing young children’s developmental needs. This mixed methods study investigated North Carolina kindergarten teachers’ understanding of child development and developmentally appropriate practice (DAP) and identified both the types of practices they use during mathematics instruction and whether the use of those …

Description’S Displacements: Writing Experience In Musil, Benjamin, And Bachmann, Aida Feng

Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dissertations

This dissertation unfolds the ways in which description emerged as an active site for reconfiguring human experience in the writing experiments of the 20th century. Description, as a procedure for presenting and arranging the phenomena of reality, typically constructs an epistemological realm of experience that progresses toward comprehension and internal consistency. Understood in this way, description mediates one kind of experiential reality while foreclosing others. This project enlarges description’s operative capabilities toward a presentational mode that does not merely re-describe the phenomenal objects in this reality. To do so, it foregrounds writers and thinkers who conversed directly with philosophical traditions …

Functional Roles Of Subcellularly Localized Glycolytic Isoforms Of Glucose 6-Phosphate Isomerase, Ian Joseph Gonzalez

Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dissertations

While metabolic pathways are largely conserved across cells and organisms, tissues exhibit metabolic heterogeneity that tailors metabolism to their physiological demands. How the conserved pathways of metabolism achieve metabolic heterogeneity is incompletely understood, particularly in vivo. In this dissertation, I investigate the genetic requirement of glucose 6-phosphate isomerase (GPI-1), a conserved glycolytic enzyme that also regulates the pentose phosphate pathway (PPP). Using CRISPR-Cas9 genome editing, I found that gpi-1 knockout animals display germline defects consistent with impaired PPP, and somatic defects consistent with impaired glycolysis. I discovered that GPI-1 isoforms are differentially expressed and localized: GPI-1A is cytosolic in all …

Glycolysis-Induced Acidification Links Mitochondrial Deficiency To Axon Degeneration, Hadas Dabas

Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dissertations

Axons extend far from the neuronal soma and depend on local energy metabolism to sustain signaling and structural integrity. Mitochondria are normally abundant in axons, where they provide numerous utilities. In many neurodegenerative diseases, however, mitochondrial function or trafficking is impaired, but the mechanisms linking mitochondrial loss to axon degeneration remain unclear.In this dissertation, I use C. elegans mitochondrial trafficking mutants, in which axons completely lack mitochondria, to define the metabolic basis of degeneration. I find that glycolysis, typically viewed as a protective energy source, unexpectedly promotes axon breakdown. Elevated glycolytic flux in axons without mitochondria leads to accumulation of …

Manufactured Enchantments: Technologizing The Self In The Twentieth-Century Americas, Isabel Ortiz

Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dissertations

Manufactured Enchantments examines the way in which forms of enchantment worked at various sites—from culture industries, to self-help doxa, to esoteric and occult practices, to intellectual life—to construct an ideal self tailored to geopolitical violence in the U.S. and Latin America during the twentieth century. The dissertation studies five technologies—psychoanalysis, film, the rotoscope, the enneagram, and the tarot—that each suggested a self that could be stretched, modified, or altered to meet conditions of violence, uncertainty and precarity stemming from pre- and peri-Cold War U.S. imperial expansion efforts in the Americas. In each case study, I examine how the featured technology …

Studies On The Structural Basis Of Oxygenic Photosynthesis, David Flesher

Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dissertations

Oxygenic photosynthesis — performed on all seven continents by green plants, algae, and cyanobacteria — supports the global biome through its ability to capture and store light energy. This is achieved through a series of protein complexes collectively known as the photosynthetic apparatus. During my PhD research, I’ve investigated the structural basis for how these protein complexes capture this light energy and transduce it to redox energy. My thesis work, summarized in this dissertation, can be grouped in two broad research themes: (i) structural studies on Nature’s water oxidation reaction, explored in Part I of this dissertation; and (ii) the …

Coordinated Wnt And Shh Signaling In Hair Follicle Mesenchyme Development And Regeneration, Yiqun Jiang

Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dissertations

Developmental morphogenesis requires cells to balance proliferation with differentiation, often regulated by multiple signaling pathways. While most studies consider these pathways as additive, less is known about how they interact to regulate fate transitions. In this dissertation, I use the hair follicle dermal condensate (DC), the first differentiated mesenchymal population of the skin with the ability to instruct new hair growth, to study morphogens interact to regulate the dermal mesenchyme.Wnt and SHH are necessary and sufficient for DC formation, during which cell cycle exit with molecular DC gene expression occur simultaneously. Interestingly, high Wnt alone is sufficient to induce cell …

Development Of The Human Brain Networks During Infancy, Huili Sun

Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dissertations

In early infancy, the human brain undergoes rapid network construction and remodeling. Advances in neuroimaging have made non-invasive, in-vivo observation of these brain changes possible during the perinatal period. However, how the brain develops to support dynamic activity and cognitive function remains unclear. In this thesis, I leverage the network control theory to model brain controllability - the capacity to drive activity changes - and examine its role in neurodevelopment. I first outline the developmental trajectories of controllability during the perinatal period and link them to synaptogenesis with cross-species models. Next, I introduce a machine-learning framework to explore how white …

A Dimensional Approach To Assessing The Effects Of Early-Life Stress On Mental Health Across Development, Emily Meryl Cohodes

Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dissertations

Decades of research inform our understanding of the pernicious effects of exposure to stress for individuals across the lifespan. This research underscores that exposure to stressful contexts places individuals at increased risk for developing cognitive, social, emotional, and physical health problems. However, exposure to stress does not have a universal effect on all individuals across development, likely due in part to the extreme heterogeneity in experiential, environmental, and temporal aspects of stress. Recent advances in the study of the psychobiological effects of stress have focused on better understanding how heterogeneity in exposure may account for heterogeneity in developmental and clinical …