Digital Commons Network^™

Accessing Campus Mental Health Services In A Nigerian Southwestern University: Barriers To Academic Success, Caroline Dada

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Mental health disorders are a significant health concern among higher education institutions in sub-Saharan Africa, including Nigeria. A substantial treatment gap exists in the Nigerian healthcare system, and this gap is further worsened by cultural and religious barriers, which reinforce stigma that discourages students from seeking professional help. This qualitative narrative inquiry explored the barriers students encountered when accessing mental health services at a university in Southwestern Nigeria, to increase service access. Qualitative semistructured interviews were conducted with seven professional mental health providers at a university counseling center between March and April 2025. Inductive thematic analysis was used to identify …

Generating Synthetic Ct From Mri Data, Foysal Ahmed

Theses and Dissertations

Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) provides excellent soft tissue contrast without ionizing radiation, making it a strong alternative to computed tomography (CT) in medical imaging workflows. However, CT remains essential for applications requiring electron density information, such as radiation therapy treatment planning. This study investigated the feasibility of generating synthetic CT (sCT) images from MRI using a deep learning-based U-Net architecture. A two-dimensional U-Net was trained on paired MRI-CT data from the SynthRAD 2025 dataset, consisting of 120 T1-weighted (T1W) and 60 T2-weighted (T2W) axial cases, including deformed CT (dCT) aligned to MRI. Model testing used an independent dataset of 30 …

A Mixed Methods Study Of Secondary Educators' Perspectives Of Edmentum As A Credit Recovery Tool In Evergreen High School, Jaya Sudha Thumati

Doctor of Education Dissertations

This study quantitatively examined the impact of Edmentum Courseware as a credit recovery tool as measured by student course completion rates and course grades, and compared graduation rates before and after its implementation at Evergreen High School (pseudonym) located in a rural district in Upstate South Carolina. Additionally, the study also qualitatively explored the perspectives of secondary educators regarding the application of Edmentum Courseware as a tool for credit recovery and its effect on student success. Using the framework from three learning theories, which are Zone of Proximal Development (Vygotsky, 1962), Universal Design for Learning (Rose & Meyer, 2002), and …

0897: William A. “Red” Dawson Collection, 1915-2023, Marshall University Special Collections

Guides to Manuscript Collections

William Alfred “Red” Dawson, a native of Valdosta, Georgia, led his high school football team to a state championship and played for four years at Florida State University. Dawson briefly played professional football for the Boston Patriots in the AFL and the Orlando Panthers. He was serving as an assistant football coach at Marshall University when a fatal plane crash killed seventy-five players, coaches, staff, and prominent citizens of Huntington. Dawson was essential in restarting the Marshall University football program, serving as acting head coach and coached through the 1971 season. He then began working in the construction industry and …

Intermittent Phrenic Afferent Activation Induces Phrenic Motor Plasticity, Nicole M. Popp, Taylor C. Holmes, Elizabeth A. Rozycki, Kristi A. Streeter

Physical Therapy Faculty Research and Publications

Approaches such as electrical stimulation of the phrenic neuromuscular system are currently used in humans to manage breathing impairments. We recently showed that electrical stimulation of the diaphragm muscle induces phrenic afferent-dependent plasticity. These findings highlight the need to better understand the mechanisms of afferent-mediated plasticity to guide and improve the development of novel therapies using electrical stimulation. Here, we tested the hypothesis that intermittent activation of large-diameter phrenic afferents induces phrenic motor plasticity, which, like other forms of plasticity, is pattern sensitive. We delivered inspiratory-triggered electrical stimulation using a narrow pulse width (0.1 ms) to preferentially activate large-diameter afferents, …

Sport Training Day Affects Adolescent Athletes’ Sleep Schedules, Abigail Larson, Jena Heck Street, Roman De Guia, Jacob J. Capin

Physical Therapy Faculty Research and Publications

Introduction: Sufficient sleep is integral to overall health whereas suboptimal sleep puts athletes at greater risk for injury, lengthens their recovery time, and decreases their performance. Our purpose was to compare sleep across training days (i.e., competition, practice, and rest) in adolescent athletes, specifically identifying differences between nights before and after training.

Methods: Participants [n = 33 (14 male, 19 female), aged 15.6 ± 1.0 years] wore an activPAL accelerometer continuously for 14 consecutive days and completed a sleep log noting training day status (i.e., competition, practice, rest).

Results: Athletes slept less on the day after competition compared to …

Transitioning To Life After Sport: Empowering Former College Varsity Athletes To Live More Healthfully, Linda Piacentine, Taylor L. Wolf, Jacob J. Capin

Physical Therapy Faculty Research and Publications

Introduction: 

The transition out of competitive sport comes with a range of psychosocial challenges for athletes, particularly when retirement is involuntary (e.g., due to injury). Little is known about the health of former athletes who often manage prior injuries and changing biopsychosocial factors.

Purpose: 

Identify the unique experiences of varsity athletes during college and as they transition to life after college sports and determine the facilitators, barriers, and needs of college varsity athletes to engage in a physically active and healthy lifestyle after competitive sport retirement.

Methods: 

Thirty former college varsity athletes (15F, 15M; mean age 23 ± 1 yrs; …

Government Research Funding And The First Amendment, Lisa Larrimore Ouellette

Emory Law Journal

Federal science research funding has become a flashpoint in the second Trump Administration, with grant terminations and political reviews that look like textbook viewpoint discrimination. Yet beyond the apparent simplicity of these cases lies an array of doctrinal puzzles about how the Free Speech Clause applies to choices made in allocating public research dollars. From an innovation-policy perspective, direct funding’s advantage over market-set tools like patent law is government agenda setting—but agenda setting inevitably entails viewpoint choices that skew the scientific marketplace of ideas.

Public research funding warrants focused First Amendment attention for several reasons. First, it often presents the …

Deference Due? “Considers” And The Insurrection Act, Joshua Braver

Emory Law Journal

This Article offers a sustained statutory interpretation of the Insurrection Act, with a particular focus on judicial deference. The Insurrection Act is the principal statutory authority for deploying, under presidential command, the military on America’s streets to enforce federal law. The conventional wisdom and recent circuit court decisions about an analogous statute give “great deference” to the President’s determinations that the statute’s deployment triggers are satisfied.

This Article argues, however, that courts do not owe “great” deference when the President seeks to deploy the military domestically under three of the Insurrection Act’s four trigger provisions. The exception is Section 252’s …

Forever Chemicals, Short-Term Funds: Minnesota’S Costly Pfas Compromise, Lauren Marie Kramer

Emory Law Journal

Over the past twenty-five years, society has come to understand the dangers PFAS pose to human health and the widespread pollution of these chemicals in the environment. As the federal government has been slow to regulate these “forever chemicals,” states and municipalities have begun to take decisive action by suing manufacturers and polluters. Minnesota was one of the first states to litigate when it sued local giant, 3M, for extensive PFAS pollution in the company’s own backyard across the eastern suburbs of the Twin Cities. The groundbreaking settlement between the state and 3M for $850 million was seen as a …

Disarming The Discretionary Function Exception: Reform For Ftca Claims Against Federal Law Enforcement, Justin R. Harvey

Emory Law Journal

Federal law enforcement agencies often make mistakes but rarely pay for them. The Federal Tort Claims Act (FTCA) is the main avenue for plaintiffs to sue the federal government for tort damages when wrongfully harmed. However, distinct procedural requirements in the FTCA limit the federal government’s liability. Notably, the FTCA’s “discretionary function exception” blocks claims arising from protected exercises of discretion by government officials, even when courts find that federal agents abused their discretion. Federal courts have struggled to apply this exception across government activity, particularly in claims against federal law enforcement—where the exception has morphed into a broad presumption …

Unplanned Obsolescence: The Dismantling Of Inter Partes Review At The U.S. Patent And Trademark Office, And What To Do About It, Elizabeth R. Ward

Emory Law Journal

Inter Partes Review (IPR), one of a set of administrative mechanisms used to review the validity of a patent after it has been granted, was once considered a key tool for patent litigators as an alternative to district court litigation. Beginning in early 2025, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) Director introduced a series of administrative rule changes involving “discretionary denial,” or the ability to deny institution of IPR proceedings. As a result, IPR has been rendered nearly unusable: the institution rate for an IPR petition has fallen from 68% in 2024 to 4% as of December 2025.

This …

Warhammer Serial Paratext: A Games Workshop Business Strategy, Neal Baker, Devaney Tennille Mosier

Information Studies Undergraduate Works

Games Workshop (GW) is a top 100 British company known for their Warhammer brand. Almost no attention has been paid to GW business strategy, however, in academic or management practitioner literature. This study addresses the analytical gap by examining how GW monetizes serial paratext over time. It connects GW's 1994–2002 magazine, The Citadel Journal, to the company's Warhammer+ digital platform TV content (2021–present) and references White Dwarf magazine (1977–present). We use reflexive thematic analysis to demonstrate seven GW paratext themes across decades. While the overall themes remain consistent, we identify changes in emphasis. For example, GW experiments with more …

Getting To Guidelines: Corralling Competing Needs At Cuny, Jahanara Alamgir, Yujin Lee, Rachael Nevins, Jojo Karlin, Andrew Mckinney

Publications and Research

This case study examines how the City University of New York (CUNY) developed guidelines for the use of generative artificial intelligence (genAI) in the creation of open educational resources (OER). CUNY is the nation’s largest urban public university, with 26 campuses distributed across New York City’s five boroughs. CUNY includes 7 community colleges, 11 senior colleges (3 of which are comprehensives), and 8 graduate, honors, and professional schools. Since the 2017-2018 academic year, CUNY’s OER Initiative has received $4 million a year of state funding to support the creation and use of OER across the university system. The OER Initiative …

Building A Common Language For Diaper Dermatitis Assessment: A Nurse Education Quality Improvement Project Using The Visscher Skin Integrity (Vsis) Scale In A Safety-Net Nicu, Kishorie Weingart, Michelle Hart, Alyssa Garcia, Naomi Del Barrio

ELMSN E-Portfolio. A collection of Scholarly and Creative Works

Globally, skin injury related to diaper dermatitis remains a pervasive yet preventable threat to neonatal patients (Jaieyoba and Visscher, 2025). In fact, the Jani et.al. 2022 study found that diaper dermatitis is the most frequently reported skin injury in premature infant patients across NICU units globally at 39%, with NICU patients in North America having a significantly higher rate of diaper dermatitis of 62%, juxtaposed to European NICU patients at 31% (Jani et.al., 2022). However, numerous studies found that implementation of a standardized skin assessment tool was a key factor in reducing rates and/or severity of perineal skin injury (Ahmadizadeh …

Chickadees In The Environment: Place-Based Learning Plan For The Msum Regional Science Center, Evelyn Ames

OER Materials

This field trip lesson engages students in investigating how environmental conditions influence that traits of living organisms through the study of the black-capped Chickadee at the MSUM Regional Science Center. Students observe chickadees and their habitats, collect evidence about physical and behavioral traits, and construct scientific arguments connecting those traits to environmental factors such as Minnesota’s cold winters and seasonal food availability. Through authentic field-based experiences, students develop observation, critical thinking, and argumentation skills while exploring the natural phenomenon of how organisms survive and adapt to their environments.

“Bald Eagles”: Place-Based Learning Plan For The Msum Regional Science Center, Addison Tidwell

OER Materials

This lesson guides elementary students through a phenomenon walk at the MSUM Regional Science Center to explore bald eagles and their connection to the Buffalo River ecosystem. Students observe habitat features, record evidence, and explain why eagles rely on river environments. The experience supports Minnesota science benchmarks and includes Indigenous perspectives on the cultural importance of eagles and caring for local ecosystems. Through observation, discussion, and reflection, students build an understanding of how bald eagles depend on healthy habitats and how humans can help protect them.

Trophy Assets, Aneil Kovvali

Articles

Rich people like to own things that make them look cool. When the thing in question is a car, house, or boat, the implications are limited. But sometimes very rich people own assets that are more important. Within media, Elon Musk acquired Twitter, Jeff Bezos ac-quired the Washington Post, and Patrick Soon-Shiong acquired the Los Angeles Times. There has also been a craze for aerospace: Musk with Space X, Bezos with Blue Origin, Richard Branson with Virgin Galactic, and going back further, Howard Hughes with Hughes Aircraft Company. It is often difficult to understand the behavior in purely finan-cial terms, …

Democratizing Restitution: Trust As An Equitable Approach To Competing Claims On Cultural Heritage Objects, Britta Redwood

Articles

As formerly colonized states began to win their independence in the mid-twentieth century, a growing chorus of voices called on museums in London, Paris, Berlin, and other European cities to return objects taken during the colonial period. Having largely ignored these requests until recently, museums throughout Europe and the United States have begun negotiating returns of these objects to their rightful owners. There is a growing recognition among Western cultural institutions that continuing to hold cultural heritage objects taken under conditions of coercion or violence is morally untenable. More recently, some scholars have argued for a human rights approach to …

Regulating Robotaxis, Bryant Walker Smith, Matthew T. Wansley

Articles

In several sunbelt cities, commercial robotaxi service has arrived. The leading robotaxi company is providing over 400,000 trips per week. The industry claims that robotaxis will save lives and provide convenient and affordable mobility. Critics counter that they will increase congestion, undermine transit, and subject the public to ubiquitous surveillance. We argue that the social impact of robotaxis depends on how they are regulated. We emphasize two points missing from the debate. First, some of the benefits of robotaxis may be political rather than technological—some longstanding public policy goals may become viable in a robotaxi world. Second, letting one private …

The Enduring Case For Bankruptcy Exceptionalism, Jared Mayer

Articles

Nearly fifty years after Congress enacted the Bankruptcy Code, a debate has emerged over the existence and desirability of “bankruptcy exceptionalism”: the idea that bankruptcy law should utilize “flexibility, creativity, and pragmatism over technicalities of process and form” to “prioritize fidelity” to “the purposes for which it was created.”  This question is especially salient in the world of corporate reorganizations, where distressed companies and their investors retain counsel precisely for the purpose of hammering out deals in complex commercial settings. In this Essay, I defend bankruptcy exceptionalism in corporate reorganizations.  I show that bankruptcy exceptionalism is a necessary and desirable …

Anti-Zionism, Antisemitism, Antidiscrimination, Zalman Rothschild

Articles

This Article uses recent anti-Zionism cases as a case study in hostile environment causation. It briefly surveys the approaches to the causation element that courts have taken in other contexts and then examines the anti-Zionism decisions in detail. It finds that courts in these cases have consistently converged on the narrowest variant of the motive-based approach, treating proof of animus—subjective hostility toward Jews—as the operative route to causation. That approach has its attractions. It preserves breathing space for political speech and resists the claim that opposition to Zionism is necessarily hostility toward Jews. But it is not the only approach …

Richmond Electronic Monitoring: The City Sees You While You're Sleeping, Fakira D. Johnson

Law Student Publications

The United States has increasingly recognized its reputation as a prison state, with widespread acknowledgment of its high incarceration rates. As of 2021, the United States imprisoned one out of every five prisoners in the world. Additionally, of its own population, the United States imprisoned one out of every one hundred people.

In response to this notoriety, worsening prison overcrowding, and the heightened risks posed by the COVID-19 pandemic, all fifty states, the District of Columbia, and the federal government increased their utilization of alternative measures to traditional incarceration. As both an addition and an alternative to traditional incarceration, criminal …

Considerations For A Mind-Body Program For Latine Adults With Chronic Pain And Cognitive Impairment: A Qualitative Study With Healthcare Providers, Natalia Giraldo-Santiago, Marlene E. Cardoza, Esther Ee Estey, Yoojee Kim, Nicolás A. Alvarez-Frank, Tony V. Pham, Zev Schuman-Olivier, Ana-Maria Vranceanu, Jonathan Greenberg

Student Publications [Scholarly]

Purpose: Chronic pain and cognitive impairment often co-occur and exacerbate each other, with Spanish-speaking Latine adults exhibiting a high prevalence of such comorbidity. While mind-body interventions for this comorbidity show promise, available programs are not tailored to the linguistic and cultural needs of socio-economically disadvantaged Latine adults with cognitive impairment. This study gathered recommendations from healthcare providers to tailor mind-body programs for Latine adults with chronic pain and cognitive impairment. Methods: We conducted six qualitative focus groups with 21 providers and support staff across various healthcare centers. Providers offered their perspectives on the needs, barriers, and general recommendations on tailoring …

School-Based Antecedent Interventions Derived From Structural Analyses: A Systematic Review And Meta-Analysis, Georgia M. Gaertner

Electronic Theses & Dissertations (2024 - present)

Disruptive behaviors in the classroom setting present immediate challenges for both students and teachers and are associated with a host of negative, long-term outcomes. Antecedent interventions are a group of behavior management strategies that can be used to target disruptive behaviors before they occur. This study consisted of a systematic review and meta-analysis of school-based antecedent interventions that were derived from a structural analysis. The results indicated that structural analytic research on school-based antecedent interventions has been conducted with students across diverse educational settings and with students with a variety of disabilities and conditions. Elementary school students and male students …

Nanostructured Cathode Catalysts For Aem Electrolysis: From Catalyst Design To Degradation And Hydrogen Dynamics, Yamini Kumaran

Electronic Theses & Dissertations (2024 - present)

Anion exchange membrane water electrolysis (AEMWE) presents a promising pathway toward cost-effective and sustainable hydrogen production by integrating the chemical robustness of alkaline systems with the compact, zero-gap design of proton exchange membrane electrolyzers. However, the widespread implementation of AEMWE is limited by the availability of highly active and durable platinum-group-metal (PGM)-free catalysts and by an incomplete understanding of their degradation behavior under realistic operating conditions.

This dissertation focuses on the development, characterization, and mechanistic investigation of nanostructured MoNi₄–MoO₂-based electrodes for efficient and stable hydrogen generation under alkaline and membrane-integrated environments. MoNi₄–MoO₂ nanorods …

After The Aid Boom: Government Responses To The Global Health Agenda And Political Commitment In Low- And Middle-Income Countries, Sana Abdelkarim

Electronic Theses & Dissertations (2024 - present)

How do governments respond to the global health agenda? Does external health assistance translate to sustained domestic political commitment in low- and middle-income countries? Over the past three decades, development assistance for health has expanded, accompanied by international agreements emphasizing country ownership, alignment, and domestic resource mobilization. Yet domestic fiscal commitment to health remains uneven across countries. These questions have become more pressing as the global aid landscape enters a period of contraction, with a significant decline in development assistance, including health financing, raising concerns about the sustainability of health systems that have become reliant on external support.  This raises …

Associations Between Neighborhood Physical And Social Stressors During Sensitive Developmental Periods And Substance Use In Early Adulthood, Abigail M. Ulofoshio

Electronic Theses & Dissertations (2024 - present)

Background

Substance use is a major public health problem. Neighborhood disadvantage and related stressors have been linked to increased substance use in adolescence and early adulthood, although findings are mixed. No studies have explored whether the timing or accumulation of neighborhood stressors in childhood and adolescence impact substance use in early adulthood. This study aims to investigate to what extent physical and social neighborhood stress during sensitive developmental periods influence substance use dependency and illicit substance use in early adulthood.

Methods

We analyzed an imputed sample (n = 7,494) from the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children (ALSPAC), a …

Moderators Of Subjective Distress And State Body Image During Open And Blind Weighing, Danielle E. Peters

Electronic Theses & Dissertations (2024 - present)

Objective: Body image disturbances are central to eating disorder (ED) pathology and are often addressed through exposure-based methods, such as open weighing. Open weighing is recommended in evidence-based ED treatments, but many clinicians and patients prefer blind weighing. It may be that pre-treatment patient characteristics may influence how distressed they feel by open and blind weighing. As such, the present study aimed to 1) compare how open and blind weighing impact subjective distress and state body image, and 2) examine whether self-weighing tendencies, body avoidance, body checking, body checking-related beliefs, intolerance of uncertainty, and ED psychopathology moderate the relationship between …

Advancing Data Extraction Workflows For Single-Case Design Meta-Analysis Using Large Language Models, Yaosheng Lou

Electronic Theses & Dissertations (2024 - present)

Single-case experimental designs (SCEDs) are a form of longitudinal research that is particularly valuable for studying marginalized and underrepresented populations. Meta-analysis plays an essential role in synthesizing evidence across studies and enhancing the generalizability of findings. However, as interest in SCEDs grows and the evidence base expands, conducting meta-analyses has become increasingly labor-intensive and time-consuming. This dissertation addresses these challenges by examining the applicability of large language models (LLMs) for data extraction and meta-analytic dataset compilation in the context of SCED meta-analysis. Because LLM performance is influenced by model selection, prompt design, and the specific materials being extracted, this dissertation …