Digital Commons Network^™

Ucf Libraries 2026 Faculty Research Showcase, Thomas R. Caswell, Patrick D. Green, Rae Mair, Yuqing Li, Athena Hoeppner, Sai Deng, Jeanne Piascik, Nokimul Hasan Arif, Peter Spyers-Duran, Tina Buck

Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

The University of Central Florida (UCF) Libraries’ Faculty Research Showcase is an annual tradition that celebrates the scholarly achievements, research, and creative work of library faculty.

The 2026 Showcase took place on August 4, 2026, and features six engaging presentations covering a diverse range of topics:

• Thomas Caswell – UCF Libraries Faculty Scholarship: Growth & Impact

• Patrick Green – Making Moves: A Cross-Institutional Presentation on Library Skill Transference

• Rae Mair & Yuqing Li – Generative AI as Peer Tutor: Designing & Evaluating a Prompt to Support Source Identification & Evaluation

• Athena Hoeppner – Have you ever …

Ground To Roof Snow Load Ratio (Gr) Data Release, Brennan Bean, Cooper Nelson, Jesse Wheeler, Scout Jarman, Salam Adil Al-Rubaye, Marc Maguire

Browse all Datasets

This data release provides historical ground-to-roof snow load ratio (GR) datasets used for snow load research and model development. The release includes original referenced datasets, cleaned country specific datasets, and a master dataset that combines Canadian and United States datasets into a standardized format for research and engineering applications.

Closing The Awareness–Behavior Gap: A Role-Based Phishing Training Framework For Higher Education, Ranylene O. Olaybal, Ryan A. Olaybal

Journal of Cybersecurity Education, Research and Practice

Phishing remains one of the most persistent cybersecurity threats facing higher education institutions, where diverse user populations and highly connected digital environments increase exposure to social engineering attacks. Although cybersecurity awareness initiatives are widely implemented, high awareness does not always translate into secure behavior. This study examined phishing awareness, phishing-related practices, phishing susceptibility, and phishing experiences among college students, teaching faculty, and administrative staff in a private higher education institution in the Philippines. Using a quantitative cross-sectional design, data were collected from 553 respondents through a validated survey instrument and analyzed using descriptive statistics, one-way analysis of variance, Tukey's honestly …

Single Fluorogens And Orientation-Localization Microscopy For Quantifying Chemical And Biomolecular Dynamics At The Nanoscale, Yiyang Chen, Yuanxin Qiu, Matthew D. Lew

Electrical & Systems Engineering Publications and Presentations

Many chemical systems look uniform only because ensemble measurements average over their most interesting molecules. Electron-transfer rates vary across electrode surfaces; lipid membranes contain nanodomains with distinct packing and fluidity; peptide aggregates exhibit local polymorphism; and biomolecular condensates contain transient networks of interactions that are blurred in ensemble images. A central challenge in chemical imaging is not simply to see smaller structures, but to measure chemical variables such as polarity, redox potential, and molecular confinement at the single-molecule level. In this Account, we describe how fluorogens, molecules whose brightness, blinking, spectral shifts, orientation, rotational mobility, and motion are directly shaped …

Dynamics Of Microscale Droplets In Respiratory Airways, Md Shamser Ali Javed

Mathematics Theses and Dissertations

We investigate trajectories of microscale evaporating droplets in a stagnation point flow near a wall of a respiratory airway. The configuration is motivated by the problem of advection and deposition of microscale droplets of respiratory fluids in human airways during transmission of infectious diseases such as tuberculosis and COVID-19. Laminar boundary layer equations are solved to describe the air flow while the equations of motion of the droplet include contributions from gravity, aerodynamic drag, and Saffman force. Evaporation is accounted for at both the droplet surface and the wall of the respiratory airway and is shown to delay droplet deposition …

Butte Priority Soils Operable Unit Final 2024 Unreclaimed Sites Sampling: Ur-46 Site Evaluation Summary Report, Pioneer Technical Services, Inc.

Silver Bow Creek/Butte Area Superfund Site

No abstract provided.

Supporting Students’ Self-Efficacy And Motivation In The Mathematics Classroom, Audrie H. Cox

Masters Projects

This project examines the role of mathematics self-efficacy in supporting student motivation, engagement, and achievement in secondary mathematics classrooms. Through a review of current research, the project identifies instructional practices that strengthen students' confidence in their mathematical abilities, including formative assessments, meaningful feedback, supportive teacher-student relationships, and opportunities for productive struggle. Drawing on these findings, a professional development workshop session was developed to equip secondary mathematics teachers with practical, research-based strategies that promote positive mathematics self-efficacy and improve overall classroom instruction. By translating research into actionable teaching practices, this project aims to support more confident, motivated, and successful mathematics learners.

Algebraic And Topological Methods In Computational Neuroscience, Trong-Thuc Trang

Electronic Theses and Dissertations 2020 - Present

Neural data is incredibly rich in combinatorial, topological, and geometrical information, reflecting the intricate shape and connectivity of neural firing patterns. To decipher these structures, neuroscience increasingly relies on advanced mathematical tools to analyze neural activity. Here we study (1) neural codes within the poset P_Code of neural codes and (2) the connectivity of neural population activity within the insular cortex when responding to interoceptive information. In (1), we establish combinatorial constructions for all upward covering relations based on what we call “isolated subsets” with supporting theorems and give a slight modification of the existing downward covering relations. We …

Ammonium Phosphate Fertilizers Are A More Effective Phosphorus Source Than Superphosphate For Wheat Grown On Acidic Gravelly Soils, Craig A. Scanlan, Raj Malik, Fien Degryse, Andrew Van Burgel, Mike J. Mclaughlin

Grain and Other Field Crops Research Articles

Selecting the most effective phosphorus (P) fertilizer source is essential for maximizing crop yields. However, there is little information to guide the choice between the widely used soluble granular sources: ammonium phosphates and superphosphates. The aims of this study were to examine whether there are differences in wheat (Triticum aestivum L.) grain yield response to ammonium phosphate and superphosphate fertilizers in field conditions, and if these differences relate to diffusion of P from fertilizer granules. Two field experiments were conducted on acidic gravelly soils in Western Australia where P deficiency occurs to compare wheat growth response to P applied …

Evaluating Diagnostic Information Preservation In Weakly Supervised Medical Imaging, Vinceline Bertrand

Electronic Theses and Dissertations 2020 - Present

Weakly supervised medical imaging models trained with coarse image-level labels often report strong performance on metrics such as accuracy and AUC. This thesis argues that these metrics can be misleading: a model may succeed on a coarse diagnostic task while failing to preserve the fine-grained information needed for consequential clinical decisions. It makes this failure measurable through the diagnostic gap, defined as the divergence between coarse and fine-grained diagnostic preservation, across three connected studies. The first shows that near-perfect ovarian ultrasound accuracy reflects visual separability rather than pathological understanding. The second measures the diagnostic gap in a mammographic pipeline, where …

Tackling Oversmoothing, Heterogeneity, And Label Distributions For Robust Graph Learning, Yufei Jin

Electronic Theses and Dissertations 2020 - Present

With the tremendous development of graph neural networks, graph learning has become a dominant solution applied to various applications naturally integrated with graph structures, including traffic networks [82], molecule networks [40, 22, 1, 30, 32], social networks [4], etc. While most existing graph learning solutions can handle homogeneous graphs (graphs with a single node type and a single edge type) and homophily graphs (graphs where node labels tend to be the same as their neighbors) for multi-class node classification downstream tasks well, in real world applications, graph structures can be more complex with heterogeneous graphs (graphs with multiple node types …

Highly Localized Droplet Clustering In Shallow Cumulus Clouds, Birte Thiede, Michael Larsen, Freja Nordsiek, Oliver Schlenczek, Yewon Kim, Eberhard Bodenschatz, Gholamhossein Bagheri

Michigan Tech Publications

The size and spatial clustering of water droplets in warm clouds influence cloud evolution and radiation properties and thus are of fundamental importance for the Earth’s energy balance and water cycle. Some proposed mechanisms for droplet growth and precipitation initiation in warm clouds require strong droplet clustering. Resolving such clustering on sub-cm scales remains a challenge. The most detailed observations, collected from aircraft, showed weak mm-scale droplet clustering averaged over kilometer scales in stratocumulus clouds. Here we present spatially resolved in-situ holographic measurements from a tethered aerostat, demonstrating that clustering in shallow cumulus clouds is significantly stronger and far more …

Atomos Komiks - Making Learning Fun With Science Entertainment, Jerome Aizpuro Suplemento Ii, Julius Noah Hernandez Sempio

DLSU Arts Congress Conference Proceedings

With portable digital devices imposing themselves on the already precarious attention span of the Filipino youth, and with raising concerns about degrading literacy of schoolchildren, it is imperative to find creative and entertaining means to inspire the young studentry to engage in dedicated educational materials. This paper explains the methods being used by a small group of artists, scientists and writers to create content for “science entertainment” in comics format. By combining principles of conceptual compression, knowledge indexing and low-elaboration persuasion techniques to develop knowledge “anchors”, the team aims to generate participatory engagement among readers and stimulate their cognitive innovation. …

Large-Scale Asymptotics In Fixed-Sample And Sequential Multiple Testing, Rahul Roy

Doctoral Theses

The advent of large-scale data acquisition technologies has led to the routine emergence of massive, dynamically evolving datasets. This has created a pressing need for statistical methodologies capable of operating effectively in both static and sequential data environments. Multiple hypotheses testing, a central tool in such settings, must therefore be adapted to both fixed-sample and sequential frameworks to ensure effective decision-making while controlling error rates. This thesis comprises two main parts. The first part addresses fixed-sample multiple testing under dependence in a Bayesian framework. Building upon the two-group mixture normal model of Bogdan et al. (2011), we extend their methodology …

Properties Of Enjoyable Mathematical Contexts From The Student Perspective, Emilie Nadine Hendrickson

Theses and Dissertations

Researchers continue to grapple with how to meaningfully engage students in mathematical content. Many students report disengagement due to perceptions that mathematics is difficult, irrelevant, boring, or anxiety-inducing. This study sought to understand how students interpret and respond to different mathematical problem contexts, with particular attention to the reasons students describe certain problems as enjoyable or unenjoyable. Using semi-structured interviews, this research examined student responses to a variety of mathematical problem types primarily across affective engagement. Students reflected on specific problem contexts and explained which features supported or hindered their enjoyment and engagement. Students described that contexts were enjoyable have …

Comparing Principal Component Analysis And Sequential Fusion Deeponet With Varying Dataset Size For Design Space Exploration Of Hypersonic Flow, J. Dallan Trentman

Theses and Dissertations

Design space exploration and optimization of hypersonic vehicles is costly due to the difficulty of producing high fidelity CFD simulations in the hypersonic domain. Reduced order modeling can allow for design optimization at a fraction of the computational cost. This paper investigates the amount of training data required to produce an accurate Reduced Order Model. A PCA based ROM is developed and compared to a Sequential Fusion DeepONet by comparing model prediction accuracy, training time, and prediction time, across dataset sizes from 25 samples to 1024 samples. These models are applied to 2D hypersonic CFD simulations of the Orion reentry …

Resonant Shock Plate Simulation And Prediction Using Modal Substructuring, Harrison C. Denning

Theses and Dissertations

Aerospace structures such as rockets can experience various shock events during flight, such as stage separation or impacts. These shock events can expose components inside the rocket to large accelerations and stresses which in turn can damage the parts. Shocks are often simulated in the lab using a resonant shock plate test. Resonant shock plate testing is often used to qualify aerospace parts, as it can mimic the shocks experienced during launch and stage separations. However, during the course of development, both the definition of the shock environment and the design of the subcomponent tend to change, so that multiple …

Clinical Utility Of An Fda-Authorized Artificial Intelligence Imaging Platform In Interstitial Lung Disease Diagnosis, Arjun Prakash Tambe, Ryan Boente, Gautam George, Fayez Kheir, Omid Tahamtani Omran, Kavitha Selvan

Division of Pulmonary, Allergy, and Critical Care Medicine Faculty Papers

Background/Objectives: The diagnosis of interstitial lung disease (ILD) is challenging and frequently delayed. Clinically accessible and minimally invasive diagnostic tools are needed to expedite the diagnosis of ILD while minimizing risk to patients. Fibresolve is an imaging artificial intelligence (AI) tool recently approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for use in ILD diagnosis and made available to clinicians. The objective of this study was to describe its utility in clinical practice. Methods: We conducted a prospective, observational study of patients across the United States (US) in whom Fibresolve was utilized during routine clinical practice between July 2024 and …

Dynamind: A Dynamic Learned Index For Update-Intensive Workloads, Jingxian Cheng, Yingfang Wang, Tianqing Zhu, Xu Yang, Ningning Cui, Jianxin Li

Research outputs 2022 to 2026

Learned indexes leverage machine learning models to approximate data distributions and predict key positions, offering better performance than traditional index structures such as B+Trees. As data in real-world applications evolve rapidly, the timely and efficient updating of learned indexes has become an increasingly important research problem, attracting growing attention in recent studies. However, under update-intensive workloads with frequent insertions and deletions, existing learned indexes cannot update the model in a timely manner. Moreover, they ignore the impact of deletions on model accuracy. These limitations lead to degraded prediction accuracy and increased query latency, undermining the core advantage of learned indexes. …

Ai And The Music Industry: Its Current Status And A Speculative Projection Of Its Evolutionary Trajectory, Rhett D. Morris, Clayton Rosati, Stefan Fritsch

Honors Projects

Music serves as one of society's biggest cultural outlets, allowing millions to share in what used to be a uniquely human form of expression. The commodification of music has built a huge industry full of companies and platforms that have used technology and property laws to shape music's relationship with the public. This study aims to look into the future to see how AI and its implementation could affect the structure of the music industry. To look into the future, this piece establishes two of the most pressing kinds of AI technology for the music industry and looks to contextualize …

Using Hip Hop Pedagogy To Bridge The Culture Of Black Children Identified With Behavioral Disorders In The Curriculum, Monique Matute-Chavarria, Pricella Morris, Monica R. Brown

Journal of the Arts and Special Education

Black and other minoritized children have listened to hip hop in the streets, in clubs, in basements, and anywhere else that they could create a space to enjoy this art form. However, hip hop has not always been welcomed in school spaces because of the lyrical content. Despite the objections to hip hop (specifically rap), minoritized children often look to it as representative of who they are and the communities they come from. Therefore, in this paper, we propose the use of hip hop strategies in the schools, utilizing its pillars (i.e., rap, DJing, breakdancing, graffiti art, and knowledge of …

Ábreme La Puerta Y Entraré: Utilizing Hip Hop Pedagogy To Build Community For English Learners With Disabilities, Ebony Nicole Perez, Georgina Rivera-Singletary

Journal of the Arts and Special Education

English Language Learners (ELL) with disabilities face complex educational experiences due to their limited English-speaking ability, coupled with their unique learning challenges. Often, they are viewed from a deficit rather than an asset perspective, leading them to feelings of isolation and marginalization. Providing opportunities to engage in transformative learning experiences, ELL students with disabilities can experience a sense of belonging and empowerment in educational endeavors. Hip-hop can offer dynamic opportunities for ELL students with disabilities by creating an inclusive, affirming space that validates diverse linguistic and cultural backgrounds. Through Hip-hop cyphers, rap battles, and collaborative songwriting, students can grasp new …

Focus Daily: Jase Special Issue On Hip-Hop, Disability, And The Continuing Evolution Of Arts-Based Pedagogy In Special Education (Side B), Jonte C. Taylor

Journal of the Arts and Special Education

Hip-hop has long served as an educational tradition, emerging from the Bronx as a cultural response to systemic inequities that fostered identity, critical consciousness, creativity, and community through its core elements of emceeing, DJing, breaking, graffiti, and knowledge of self. In this second special hip-hop issue of the Journal of the Arts in Special Education (JASE) and building on the initial 2025 JASE special issue, this collection advances hip-hop pedagogy beyond an engagement strategy by positioning it as a culturally inclusive framework that supports academic achievement, identity affirmation, and meaningful participation for students with disabilities. The contributing scholars explore how …

Stochastic Inverse Problems In Stochastic Elliptic And Parabolic Pdes, Zi-Jia Gong

Theses

This dissertation presents a computational framework for solving stochastic inverse problems in partial differential equations (PDEs) with random data. The objective is to recover unknown random coefficients in parabolic and elliptic diffusion equations, as well as nearly incompressible linear elasticity models. To achieve this, optimization-based approaches are used to minimize regularized Energy Least Squares (ELS) and Output Least Squares (OLS) objective functionals. Both direct and adjoint methods are used to estimate the gradient and Hessian of the objective functionals with respect to the coefficients. To avoid the expensive computation of the full Hessian matrix, the Newton-CG-like method is also adopted, …

Journal Of The Arts And Special Education: Volume 6, Issue 2

Journal of the Arts and Special Education

No abstract provided.

The Effects Of Using Hip-Hop Song Lyrics During Instruction For Students With Emotional And Behavioral Disorders, Jonte C. Taylor, Millie Rodriguez

Journal of the Arts and Special Education

Hip-hop pedagogy has emerged as a culturally responsive instructional framework designed to increase student engagement, identity affirmation, and academic achievement by incorporating elements of hip-hop culture into classroom instruction. Despite growing interest in hip-hop-based education, limited empirical research has examined its effectiveness for students with disabilities, particularly students identified with emotional and behavioral disorders (EBD). This study investigated the effects of using hip-hop song lyrics during English language arts instruction to teach literary devices to three secondary students with EBD using a single-case multiple-baseline-across-participants probe design. Three comparison students receiving traditional textbook-based instruction were also included. Dependent variables included instructional …

Recognition Of Autism Characteristics In Females: An Examination Of Stakeholders, Laurel Lyn Bishop

Theses and Dissertations

Autism is a neurodevelopmental communication disorder, characterized by differences in social communication, attention, interests, and sensory perception. Diagnostic criteria have historically applied to males, but clinical diagnostic criteria beginning in 2022 now include slight differences in traits comprising the female phenotype. Until recently, autistic females may be missed by the professional and education community or diagnosed later than males. Like their autistic male counterparts, they face an increased risk of suicidal ideation, but they also face more difficulties in peer relationships, academic problems, and increased anxiety and depressive symptoms, but may not get supports. School-age girls spend their days with …

Toroidal Plasmonic Nanodimers For Enhanced Near-Infrared Emission In Heterostructured Inp Quantum Dots, Arda Gülücü, Emre Ozan Polat

Turkish Journal of Physics

Near-infrared (NIR) emitters operating in the 650--900 nm spectral range are highly attractive for imaging and sensing in turbid media. However, cadmium-free InP-based quantum dots (QDs) often exhibit limited brightness owing to nonradiative recombination pathways and inefficient photon outcoupling. In particular, heterostructured InP QDs may possess band alignments that induce partial spatial separation of charge carriers, thereby reducing the electron-hole wavefunction overlap. This characteristic modifies the intrinsic recombination dynamics and increases the sensitivity of their emission to the surrounding photonic environment. Here, we investigate silver toroidal plasmonic nanoantenna dimers (Ag TPNDs) using finite-difference time-domain (FDTD) simulations as a geometry-tunable platform …

Mathematics Anxiety And Academic Performance In Mathematics, Bradley Vandermissen

Masters Projects

Mathematics anxiety represents a psychological barrier that negatively impacts student academic performance and self-efficacy across all educational levels. Many secondary mathematics students experience physiological stress, self-doubt, and reduced working memory efficiency when encountering mathematical tasks, often leading to disengagement or an over-reliance on artificial intelligence (AI as a learning shortcut rather than an educational tool. Despite the widespread nature of this issue, educators frequently lack the formal training and practical pedagogical strategies necessary to identify, manage, and alleviate mathematics anxiety within their classrooms. Rooted in Bandura’s Social Cognitive Theory, this project addresses the underlying cognitive and biological components of mathematics …

Influence Of Transboundary Wildfire Smoke On Fine Particulate Matter Concentrations At South Texas Border Schools, Sai Deepak Pinakana, Kabir Bahadur Shah, Owen Temby, Dawid K. Wladyka, Juan L. Gonzalez, Md Saydur Rahman, Katarzyna Sepielak, Amit U. Raysoni

School of Earth, Environmental, & Marine Sciences Faculty Publications

Exposure to air pollutants in indoor and outdoor school environments poses significant health risks to children due to their heightened vulnerability. Increasing wildfire frequency has intensified transboundary smoke transport, with border communities among the first to experience associated air quality impacts. While the impacts of wildfires on air quality are increasingly recognized through satellite observations and modeling, ground-based observations remain scarce in under-monitored regions. Low-cost air sensors were deployed across schools in the Roma and Rio Grande City areas of Starr County, along the U.S.–Mexico border, for 146-days from November 2023 to April 2024. The raw sensor measurements were corrected …