Digital Commons Network^™

Advancing Hand Therapy Practice Through Specialized Clinical Reasoning And Patient Education, Candace Heinlein

Capstone Projects

This doctoral capstone experience (DCE) was completed at Corewell Health Grand Rapids Hospitals Hand Therapy Clinic and focused on two ACOTE concentration areas including advanced clinical practice skills and education. The experience combined hands-on clinical practice in a specialized outpatient hand therapy setting with the development of high-quality client education materials and home exercise programs (HEPs). Objectives were created to address identified needs through the creation of client education handouts, development of diagnosis-specific Medbridge HEP templates, and creation of training resources to improve therapist efficiency with Medbridge use. Outcomes of the project included improved access to evidence-based educational materials, reduced …

Semiochemicals And Odorant Receptors Underlying Potato Cultivar Susceptibility And Resistance To Potato Tuber Moth, Ruipeng Chen, Wangtao Hu, Qin Hu, Junjie Yan, Jiao Yin, Fathiya M. Khamis, Yulin Gao, Walter S. Leal

All Peer-Reviewed Publications

Infestation of potato by the potato tuber moth (Phthorimaea operculella) varies markedly among cultivars, yet the chemical and molecular mechanisms underlying this variation remain poorly understood. Here, we combine field surveys, chemical ecology, functional genomics, and structural modeling to reveal how cultivar-specific volatile profiles shape moth oviposition behavior and pest outcomes. Field and laboratory assays identified marked differences in adult attraction, oviposition, and larval damage among potato cultivars, which correlated with distinct blends of emitted volatile organic compounds (VOCs). Behavioral analyses revealed that among other VOCs, trans-nerolidol and β-ionone act as attractants, whereas 3-carene and benzyl tiglate function as oviposition …

Mastery By Mistakes: Reframing Failure In Higher Education Skill-Based Teaching And Assessment, Maura Metheny

JWU Dissertations & Theses

Experiencing a mistake, error or failure while learning generates an additional inquiry process that activates prior knowledge and increases retention of subsequent feedback and new material (Kapur, 2008). The use of errors to guide practice has been shown to lead to skill-mastery and expertise (Ericsson et al., 1993). When classrooms are psychologically safe environments where penalty-free exploration and knowledge application are encouraged, students gain a deeper understanding of the content (Tulis, 2013). This qualitative exploratory descriptive study aimed to understand the ways that undergraduate faculty in skill-based disciplines involve errors, mistakes and failures in teaching and …

Predictive Analytics In Oncology And Ophthalmology: Machine Learning Applications For Diabetic Retinopathy And Breast Cancer, Ali Abidalkareem

Electronic Theses and Dissertations 2020 - Present

The convergence of artificial intelligence and healthcare represents one of the most transformative developments in modern medicine, with deep learning technologies emerging as powerful tools for addressing complex diagnostic challenges. This dissertation develops and validates machine learning frameworks that address critical challenges in medical diagnosis through innovative approaches to data augmentation, feature learning, and classification, focusing on two fundamental problems: Diabetic Retinopathy (DR) severity classification using multi-model convolutional neural networks (CNNs), and breast cancer stage identification using microRNA (miRNA) gene expression biomarkers. For diabetic retinopathy classification, this work proposes an ensemble deep learning framework that integrates Diffusion-based data augmentation for …

Trading Precarities: How Bangladeshi Freelancers Leverage The Digital Economy Amid Local Insecurity And Ai Disruption, Naim Bin Hasan

Electronic Theses and Dissertations 2020 - Present

This study examines how Bangladeshi freelancers use digital platform work to cope with precarious local labor markets and how this strategy both mitigates and reproduces insecurity. In this form of work, freelancers compete for short-term, skill-based remote jobs posted by global clients. Drawing on 30 in-depth interviews and virtual ethnography, this study challenges dominant Western understandings of the precariat that assume workers fall from stable employment into insecure work. Instead, the findings show that many freelancers enter platform labor strategically as a way out of already unstable and limited local opportunities. While freelancing carries a promise of foreign income, flexibility, …

Suppressing Saints And Suffering Sinners: An Analysis Of Reductive Tropes Through The 2025 Film Sinners, Kaila Palmer

Electronic Theses and Dissertations 2020 - Present

Ryan Coogler’s 2025 horror film Sinners is set in a predominantly Black Mississippi community during the Jim Crow era and explores the vulnerability and hypervisibility of Black people. Vampires and Klansmen fixate on Black bodies, treating them as consumable and dispensable sources. Prior to its Amazon Prime debut and extended theatrical run, Sinners grossed over $300 million, signaling its cultural impact and contribution to reshaping representations of Black identity in cinema. As part of Coogler’s broader array of Black storytelling, the film disrupts entrenched stereotypes by emphasizing character depth rather than caricature.

This paper analyzes the characters Annie and the …

Messages From The Provost, Georgia Southern University

Messages from the Provost

• Message from the Provost
• Where Care Meets Impact
• Where Students Lead
• Where Innovation Takes Flight

Artificial Intelligence In Low-Dose Computed Tomography Lung Cancer Screening: Clinical Integration, Validation, And Translational Challenges, Valeria Vanessa Varela Betancourt, Archana Acharya, Nusrat Jahan, Udit Kapahi, Insharah Khalid, Syed Maaz Shah, Hassan Ibrahim, Bushra Nawaz, Shazma Shayan, Maia Valls Palacios Reese, Sheeza Nadeem, Manju Rai

Student Publications

Lung cancer remains the leading cause of cancer-related mortality worldwide, largely due to late-stage diagnosis. Low-dose computed tomography (LDCT) screening has demonstrated significant mortality reduction in high-risk populations; however, its widespread implementation is limited by high false-positive rates, inter-reader variability, and substantial workflow burden. Artificial intelligence (AI) has emerged as a promising adjunct to address these challenges by enhancing diagnostic consistency, efficiency, and risk stratification in LDCT-based screening. This narrative review aims to synthesize current evidence on AI methodologies, clinical applications, validation studies, and translational challenges in LDCT-based lung cancer screening. A structured literature search was conducted across PubMed, Scopus, …

Four Years Of Training In Leadership And Effective Communication Through Service, Manmeet Hayer '26

Senior Presentation of Learning

My Bonner education has been shaped by a deeply practical approach to service: I consistently chose sites and projects that would strengthen not only my ability to communicate effectively with different populations, but also my ability to recognize what those interactions revealed about deeper needs, gaps, and problems that required action. Throughout my four years with Bonner, that approach guided the full arc of my journey. During my first year, I focused extensively on education-centered service, working as an ESL tutor, supporting eligible 21st Century Scholars through EDGE 21, and serving as a counselor at a Lutheran summer camp during …

Building Community Through Communication: A Bonner Scholar's Journey In Health Equity And Its Impacts, Samrawit (Samri) Soloman '26

Senior Presentation of Learning

As a Global Health major on the pre-medical track, I focused my Bonner experiences on becoming a culturally conscious physician who advocates for community health justice. My Bonner journey lead me to realize that communication is the foundation of building community. It was only through the multidisciplinary opportunities across different areas of health that I developed a more comphrehensive understanding of health equity. My experiences and leadership developemnt in Bonner equipped me with the tools to recognize overlap among health organizations and to use my professional skills to form partnerships and promote health equity.

How Bonner Influenced My Love For Education And Non-Profit Work, Abbygail Napper '26

Senior Presentation of Learning

There will never be enough space for me to write all of the things that Bonner has taught me over the last 4 years. Bonner has taught me the importance of civic engagement and how imperative it is to your community that you get involved. Just a little bit of involvement goes a long way. Bonner has taught me an immense amount of life skills, from interacting with people in a professional setting, to creating a resume and applying for jobs, to simply just getting your work done on time. Bonner has morphed me into the hard worker that I …

Cultivating Community Through Service And Leadership, Alberto Zamora Martinez '26

Senior Presentation of Learning

Introduced to the Bonner Program after committing to DePauw University Encouraged to apply by older brother, Eduardo (DePauw Class of 2021, former Bonner Scholar) Committed all four years to service at Asbury Towers Supported residents’ well-being in a retirement community focused on care, respect, and collaboration Helped create volunteer opportunities for Bonner Scholars and other DePauw students Developed a strong passion for public service and strengthened my long-term commitment to helping others

Improving Patient Health Portal Enrollment In The Primary Care Setting, Erika L. Bell

Doctoral Dissertations & Projects

In today’s increasingly digital healthcare environment, patient health portals have become critical tools for enhancing communication, improving care coordination, and empowering patients to actively participate in their health management. These secure, web-based platforms allow patients to access medical records, request prescription refills, view lab results, and message providers. Although patient health portals are offered by a vast majority of U.S. health systems, they remain underutilized, with only 15-30% of patients engaging with these platforms despite their potential to improve patient engagement, health status awareness, and care quality. Enhancing patient health portal use not only empowers patients but also supports broader …

Landscaping Of Mcp: An Overview Of Mcp Mitigations And Tools, Arden Michel

Cybersecurity Undergraduate Research Showcase

The Model Context Protocol (MCP) has quickly become the standard for enabling agentic AI systems to interact with external tools, data sources, and services. Since its debut in 2024, MCP has been adopted by companies such as Google, Apple, Meta, and IBM. While this integration greatly improves the capabilities of large language models (LLMs), it also creates a new attack surface that the security community is only beginning to understand systematically.

A key architectural challenge is MCP's fundamental reliance on implicit trust: servers often run locally with high privileges, tool descriptions are accepted without question, and external servers are presumed …

Resource-Aware Cooperative Perception For Autonomous Driving, Matthew Magee

Theses

In recent years, many new vehicles equipped with autonomous driving capabilities have been deployed around the world, but they still have a number of failure cases. One proposed solution to improve performance in these scenarios is cooperative perception, a paradigm in which vehicles communicate with other vehicles and nearby sensors to collect additional perception information about the environment. Prior work has demonstrated that cooperative perception can be accomplished with the high accuracy and low latency needed for autonomous driving. However, state-of-the-art systems rely on unrealistic assumptions about the conditions of the network connections between participating nodes and the compute resources …

The "Quiet Professionals": Oral Histories Of The United States Special Forces Veterans Of The Global War On Terror, Chase Rumbley

Electronic Theses and Dissertations 2020 - Present

This thesis examines how United States Army Special Forces veterans of the Global War on Terror narrate the identity of the "Quiet Professional" across training, deployment, and post-service life. Drawing on oral history interviews with four retired Green Berets, as well as archival and material culture analysis, the study approaches Special Forces as a distinctive military institution shaped by narrative, institutional formation, and war. It argues that Special Forces ethos is not a fixed warrior identity, but a lived and contested achievement produced through rites of passage, embodied hardship, informal legitimacy, and collective memory. Participants describe becoming Special Forces as …

Global Impact Of Germline Structural Variation On The Cancer Proteome, Fengju Chen, Yiqun Zhang, Luis F Paulin, Darshan S Chandrashekar, Sooryanarayana Varambally, Fritz J Sedlazeck, Chad J Creighton

Faculty, Staff and Students Publications

Proteome and transcriptome data combined can help assess the relevance of non-coding germline variants. Here, we combine germline Structural Variants (SVs) with mass spectrometry-based proteomics on tumors from 1637 cancer patients spanning various tumor tissues of origin to determine the extent SV breakpoint patterns involve differential protein expression of nearby genes. Rare and singleton SVs disrupting protein expression of known cancer susceptibility genes collectively involve 6% of patients. About 24% of the hundreds of genes with SV-associated non-coding cis-regulatory alterations at the mRNA level are similarly associated at the protein level. Both rare and common SVs may associate with differential …

Feasibility Of Digital Environment In Al-Madinah Al-Munawaroh Schools And Teachers Attitudes Towards It, Khaled Muraya Alqahtani

University of Bisha Journal for Educational Sciences

This study aimed to identify the availability of a digital environment in Madinah schools and teachers’ attitudes towards it. The study employed a descriptive-analytical approach using a questionnaire, one of the most widespread and commonly used research tools across various scientific fields. It is more effective in terms of saving time and reducing costs, and it allows for data collection from a larger number of individuals compared to other methods. A simple random sampling of 213 male and female secondary school teachers in Madinah was selected to represent the study sample. The study’s findings indicate that the digital environment in …

Performing Professional Persona On Whatsapp: Gendered Self-Presentation And Authority Negotiation Among Saudi Women At Work, Meshari Ali Al-Sairi

UB Journal for Humanities

Drawing on Goffman’s concept of persona as a strategic and situational performance, the study examines written responses elicited through guided workplace scenarios designed to simulate high-stakes professional interaction on WhatsApp. The study adopted a qualitative, interpretive, discourse-pragmatic research design. The sample of the study included 30 women and 10 men employed in academic or administrative roles at the University of Bisha, and data were collected through semi‑structured, DCT‑style guided written prompts tailored to WhatsApp communication. Findings outlined three recurring persona patterns in women’s responses which are not interpreted as individual communication styles, but as systematic and adaptive responses to the …

An Analysis Of Teacher Talk In A Senior High School In Palu, Central Sulawesi Through The Use Of Self-Evaluation Of Teacher Talk (Sett), Moh. Abraham Akbar Eisenring, Margana

Jurnal Pendidikan Humaniora

This present research tended to analyze the teacher talk performed by the English teachers in a Senior High School in Palu, Central Sulawesi through the use of Self-Evaluation of Teacher Talk (SETT). This research employed a case study research design, in the nature of qualitative research. Random sampling technique was used in determining the research’s participants. From the results of the research, it was found that the English teachers implemented all of the fourteen interactional strate- gies of SETT. Besides, the teachers and students’ perceptions were also investigated.

Drawing-Based Story Telling Influence On Children Language Development And Social Aspect, Hariddha Yuni Sulistyaningrum, Imanuel Hitipeuw, Triyono Triyono

Jurnal Pendidikan Humaniora

Language and social development of children plays an important role in influencing further development. The objectives of this research are to determine the effect of drawing based on story- telling toward language development and social development of children age 5–6 years. Single subject research with reversal design ABAB was used in this experimental research. Four kindergarten children identified having language and social problems became the subjects. The observation was used to col- lect data. In addition, the data were put into graphs to be analyzed by using visual inspection. The results showed that drawing activities based on story telling could …

Strategies Of Cultural Integration In Successful Merger-Companies, Achmad Supriyanto, Burhanuddin

Jurnal Pendidikan Humaniora

This research aimed to discover strategies in integrating a new culture within the merger companies. The strategies have elements including values, phases, leader role, and the system of cul- tural integration construction. This research used a meta-analysis with an expose facto research de- sign. Findings indicate new cultural integrations were carried out by many companies through demon- strating internal and external values. Integrations are implemented through ‘pre, process, and post- merger’. The most important in the preliminary stage is started by benchmarking, leading entire stages, and keeping a balance of collaboration between human and non-human aspects as well as leader …

Teachers’ Beliefs About Communicative Language Teaching (Clt) And The Implementation In Classroom Practices, Trifita Setyaningrum

Jurnal Pendidikan Humaniora

This study aims at investigating the match between beliefs and classroom practices about communicative language teaching (CLT). Survey design through questionnaire for professional teachers of English and guided interviews is employed in this study. The 25 questionnaire items revealed the teachers’ belief about CLT and the classroom practices based on its characteristics, i.e.: overall goals, relationship of form and function, fluency-accuracy, focus on real-world contexts, autonomy and stra- tegic involvement, teacher roles, and student roles. The data were gathered, reduced, grouped, and verified. The results showed that the highest discrepancy is on the aspect of fluency-accuracy.

Thematic Text Book Development Based On Local Wisdom, Wina Nurfitriani, Sumarmi, Hariyono

Jurnal Pendidikan Humaniora

Local wisdom based education is a part of the implementation of character building principles in education which enable students to prepare themselves for future. The local wisdom plays significant role since the implementation of real-life context in teaching learning activities is the best approach to initiate the lesson. Not only as a basis in teaching learning activity, the implementation of local wisdom will assist student to comprehend every concept in learning material, therefore students will be able to implement their cognitive ability in daily life. One of means of integrating local wisdom is by transferring it to the textbook. Research …

Demotivating Factors In Learning English: Students’ Perceptions, Lutfiyan Khusyabaroh, Utami Widiati, Mirjam Anugerahwati

Jurnal Pendidikan Humaniora

Students’ demotivation is an area which is not widely reached from studies. It is essential to revover the students’ demotivation factors in learning English. 240 ninth grade of junior high schools students were taken part. There were four factors of demotivation, they were seen from teacher, class- mates, text books and activities, and students’ characteristics aspects.

Observing Debate In Learning On Students’ Critical Thinking, A. Jauhar Fuad, I Wayan Ardhana, Sulton Sulton, Dedi Kuswandi

Jurnal Pendidikan Humaniora

The objective of this research prove of difference between the limited critical thinking ability and the general critical thinking ability of learners using the methods of debate and discussion with learners who have different learning styles. Using a quasi-experimental design with testing and rating scales, the results showed: (1) there is no difference between the limited critical thinking ability of learn- ers between students who use the method of debate and discussion. There is a difference between the general critical thinking ability of learners between students using the method of debate and those who are using discussion method (2) there …

The Community Empowerment Through Social And Educational Institutions, Bayu Adi Laksono

Jurnal Pendidikan Humaniora

The purpose of this study is to explore the role of social and educational institutions in Ba- julmati in the process of community empowerment. This research uses a qualitative approach. The in- formants in this study consisted of government institutions, empowerment activists from social and educational institutions, and the surrounding community. The results of the study show the role of so- cial and educational institutions in empowering Bajulmati people. Communities are empowered through the utilization of natural and human resources, to always be optimistic and independent, and empow- ered through school education institutions aimed at increasing competitiveness, education outside the …

The Combination Of Peer And Self-Directed Feedback On Writing Ability Of Efl High Proficient Students, Rizky Amelia, Mohammad Adnan Latief, Enny Irawati

Jurnal Pendidikan Humaniora

This study examined whether high proficient students who are trained with the treatment of the combination of peer and self-directed feedback (PSF) have better writing ability than the high profi- cient students who are not trained with this treatment. Employing a quasi-experimental research, this study involved two groups of 28 students given a writing test. The results pointed out that the stu- dents who were trained with the combination of PSF had better writing ability than the students who were not trained with the combination of PSF. Teachers are suggested to provide the combination of PSF to high proficient students. …

The Rhetorical Moves In Indonesian Efl Thesis Abstracts Across Educational Levels, Shinta Amalia, A. Effendi Kadarisman, Ekaning D. Laksmi

Jurnal Pendidikan Humaniora

This study aims at investigating the rhetorical moves and steps of 24 undergraduate and graduate thesis abstracts. It mainly focuses on how the writers demonstrate the realization of linguistics yielding the conventional and standardized abstract writing convention. This corpus-based research utilizes the descriptive qualitative design. The result of this study reveals that most thesis abstracts have accommodated five moves. Interestingly, five out of eight abstracts written by students with low- level GPA come complete five moves, but only three out of five written by high-leveled GPA students present the complete five moves. In addition, several overlapping steps occur in the …

The Effectiveness Of Role-Play Integrated With Word Cards On Students’ Speaking Skill For Communication, Bagus Putra Krisdiana, Enny Irawati, A. Effendi Kadarisman

Jurnal Pendidikan Humaniora

This study aims to investigate the effectiveness of role play integrated with word cards on students’ speaking skill for communication. A one group pretest-posttest design with the 23 students were given treatments for six meetings. To achieve the aim of the study, a pretest before the treatment, and posttest, after the treatment, are constructed. Then, the mean scores of both tests are compared. It is found that the mean score in the posttest is significantly higher than in the pretest. It means role-play integrated with word cards is effective in improving students’ speaking skill for communication.