Digital Commons Network^™

Effect Of Standardized Phone Call Protocol On The Achievement Of Target Hba1c Levels, Felicia Choyce

All Doctor of Nursing Practice (DNP) Scholarly Projects

Problem:

Type 2 Diabetes Mellitus is a common chronic illness with far-reaching health and financial consequences. At the project’s primary care clinic, the average hemoglobin A1c among adults with Type 2 Diabetes Mellitus was 9.6%, exceeding the recommended clinical goal of less than 7% (American Diabetes Association, 2023). The absence of a standardized follow-up protocol and inconsistent use of health literacy-based communication contributed to persistent hyperglycemia and failure to reach target HbA1c levels. These factors indicated an urgent need for an evidence-based intervention.

Aim of the Project:
The aim of this project was to reduce HbA1c levels among adults with …

Improving Provider Documentation For Procedure Authorizations: A Nursing Perspective On Enhancing Outcomes And Compliance, Juli Legg

All Doctor of Nursing Practice (DNP) Scholarly Projects

Insurance denials resulting from non-standardized documentation and communication gaps in the prior authorization process adversely impacted financial performance and patient care within the electrophysiology (EP) department of a large Midwest academic medical center. High denial rates for costly procedures revealed a need for improved alignment with payer medical necessity criteria. This quality improvement (QI) project aimed to enhance provider documentation, reduce denials, improve care delivery, and increase revenue by implementing standardized documentation templates. A review of the literature supports that standardized documentation and clinical decision support tools enhance consistency, reduce errors, and improve prior authorization success rates. Guided by the …

Systemic, Cultural, And Institutional Barriers Significantly Limit Black Girls' Access To Mental Health Care In The United States, And Reform Is Needed To Create Equitable Support Systems, Macie Anderson

Distinguished Student Scholarship Collection

This paper explores how systemic, cultural, and institutional barriers prevent Black girls in the United States from accessing equitable mental health care. Drawing from peer-reviewed research and government reports, it highlights the roles of racism, stereotypes, underrepresentation in mental health professions, and school-based discipline disparities. The argument pushes for reforms in access, education, and culturally responsive care, advocating for justice-centered mental health systems that affirm and support Black girls holistically. This work seeks to challenge stigmas, expose inequities, and ignite change by centering the lived experiences of an often-overlooked population. [Abstract provided by the author.]

Wnt-Directed Cxcl12-Expressing Apical Papilla Progenitor Cells Drive Tooth Root Formation, Mizuki Nagata, Gaurav T Gadhvi, Taishi Komori, Yuki Arai, Hiroaki Manabe, Angel Ka Yan Chu, Ramandeep Kaur, Meer Ali, Yuntao Yang, Chiaki Tsutsumi-Arai, Yuta Nakai, Yuki Matsushita, Nicha Tokavanich, W Jim Zheng, Joshua D Welch, Noriaki Ono, Wanida Ono

Faculty, Staff and Student Publications

The tooth root is a critical component of the tooth anchored to surrounding alveolar bones. Tooth root formation is driven by cells in the apical papilla (AP) that generate new dentin-forming odontoblasts at the root-forming front. Mesenchymal stem cells have been isolated from AP for regenerative use; however, how AP cells physiologically coordinate tooth root formation remains undefined. We find that CXCL12+ cells emerge in AP under hypoxic environments at the onset of tooth root formation. Using Cxcl12-creER-based cell-lineage analysis, we further find that CXCL12+ AP cells contribute not only to odontoblasts but also to cementum-forming cementoblasts of the elongating …

Boundary-Setting And Choice-Making With No "Adult" In The Room: Professional Identity Formation Opportunities For 1ls In The Transactional Context, Marni Goldstein Caputo, Kathleen Luz

Faculty Scholarship

Law schools are now required by the American Bar Association’s Standard 303(b)(3) to provide students with opportunities for professional identity formation throughout their legal education. It is critical that those opportunities be well-balanced and tied to the realities of practice. Yet until recently, we, as 1L lawyering skills professors at Boston University School of Law, only provided those opportunities in the litigation context. Further, our 1L lawyering skills curriculum was, since its inception, almost entirely steeped in litigation. This litigation focus matches neither the career trajectory nor the upper-level experiential opportunities of the majority of our students. In fact, transactional …

Mtu-Llm: Llm-Based Multi-Robot Task Allocation And Path Planning For Heterogeneous Robots In Search And Rescue Operations, Kaushik Kannan, Jungyun Bae

Michigan Tech Publications

Urban Search and Rescue operations after natural disasters involve locating and assisting victims in hazardous environments, which is challenging. Classical Multi-Robot Task Allocation (MRTA) and path planning approaches have been used to deploy heterogeneous robot teams in unsafe areas. However, existing methods often lack focus on workload balance and requirement fulfillment and struggle to generalize across different scenarios. To address these challenges, we propose Multi-robot Task allocation Utilizing LLMs (MTU-LLM), a framework designed to reduce the development time for task allocation and path planning approaches, enabling faster robot deployment. The framework uses an LLM-based “prompt engineering” approach that generates task …

Patient-Centered Approach To Decrease Length Of Stay, Erika Beck

All Doctor of Nursing Practice (DNP) Scholarly Projects

Problem: Unmet social needs contribute to hospital readmissions and extended inpatient stays, placing strain on care coordination and hospital throughput. Social Determinants of Health (SDOH), such as housing instability, lack of transportation, or food insecurity, are often unaddressed in clinical workflows. At the project site, a gap in effectively integrating SDOH into the discharge planning process led to delayed discharges and increased length of stay (LOS). Additionally, 41.20% exceeded the Geometric Mean Length of Stay (GMLOS), surpassing the organizational benchmark of 40.17%. Gaps in standardized assessment and communication of SDOH data limited the ability to plan timely discharges and connect …

Bicomplex Hardy Classes Of Solutions To Beltrami Equations And The Schwarz Boundary Value Problem, William L. Blair

Math Faculty Publications and Presentations

We define Hardy classes of bicomplex-valued functions on the complex unit disk which solve bicomplex versions of the Beltrami and related equations. Using representations in terms of their complex-valued counterparts, we show these bicomplex-valued functions recover the boundary behavior associated with the classic holomorphic Hardy spaces. This work generalizes known results for complex-valued functions and continues recent work in the setting of bicomplex analogues of Hardy spaces of both holomorphic and generalized analytic functions. Also, we show Schwarz and Dirichlet boundary value problems associated with the bicomplex Beltrami equation are solvable and provide solution formulas.

Introduction To Leadership Concepts Handbook, Seth D. Kastle, Lori E. Kniffin, Brett Whitaker, Justin Greenleaf, Brent Goertzen, Donnette Noble, Tamas Kowalik

Leadership Open Educational Resources

This handbook was developed through a collaborative effort between a team of faculty members and AI tools. While AI assisted in drafting and organizing content, faculty members provided the scholarly direction, curated all academic references, and shaped the narrative to meet the needs of introductory undergraduate learners. Every section has been carefully reviewed and vetted to ensure both accuracy and academic integrity. The purpose of this text is to offer a clear, concise, and accessible resource that summarizes essential concepts without requiring students to purchase a textbook.

West Antarctic Ice Retreat And Paleoceanography In The Amundsen Sea In The Warm Early Pliocene, Sandra Passchier, Claus-Dieter Hillenbrand, Sidney R. Hemming, Werner Ehrmann, Thomas Frederichs, Steven M. Bohaty, Ronald Leon, Olga Libman-Roshal, Lisbeth Mino-Moreira, Karsten Gohl, Julia S. Wellner

Department of Earth and Environmental Studies Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

Mass loss from polar ice sheets is poorly constrained in estimates of future global sea-level rise. Today, the marine-based West Antarctic Ice Sheet is losing mass at an accelerating rate, most notably in the Thwaites and Pine Island glacier drainage basins. Early Pliocene surface temperatures were about 4 °C warmer than preindustrial and maximum sea level stood ~20 m above present. Using data from a sediment archive on the Amundsen Sea continental rise, we investigate the impact of prolonged Pliocene ocean warmth on the ice-sheet−ocean system. We show that, in contrast to today, during peak ocean warming ~4.6 − 4.5 …

What's The Matter With Lozada: How The Board Of Immigration Appeals Coerces Immigration Lawyers To Breach Legal Ethics, Kari E. Hong

Articles

In general, if an attorney makes a mistake, they can cure it by notifying the forum and filing the appropriate remedy. Immigration law, by contrast, stands alone by requiring the client (or a new attorney) to corroborate any mistake by filing a bar complaint against the first attorney. This requirement was established in a 1988 case, called Matter of Lozada. Much has been written on how the Lozada rule is unnecessary (a mistake does not need to be corroborated by a bar complaint and state bars are complaining about a deluge of unnecessary complaints for negligence) and harms the immigration …

Immigration Federalism In The Second Trump Administration, Stella Burch Elias

Articles

This Article explores the ongoing transformation of state and local engagement in immigration-related rulemaking in the United States during the Second Trump Administration. The Article examines the myriad ways in which federal executive actions and state responses to those actions, alongside independent state actions and the federal government’s responses to those actions, are upending longestablished immigration law doctrines and shifting the borders of American federalism. The Article discusses legal scholars’ previous understanding of immigration federalism, embodied in United States v. Arizona, and the prior distinctions between permissible “alienage” laws and impermissible “immigration” laws, which could not be introduced by state …

Equity Fund Monthly Report, July 2025, Archway Investment Fund

Archway Investment Fund

No abstract provided.

Autism Care Continuum: Exploring Specialty Services Across The Lifespan Within U.S. Academic Medical Centers, Alexis Khuu

Theses and Dissertations

Autistic people—particularly adults—experience high rates of co-occurring mental health problems and often report unmet service needs. Although several barriers to accessing quality care are well-documented, the broader landscape of autism-specific services across the lifespan remains under-researched. This two-part thesis aimed to address this gap by examining the availability of autism-specific services, as well as patterns in service utilization and associated costs, among autistic children and adults. The first study employed a systematic web-scraping protocol and data extraction procedure to identify and characterize autism specialty services offered by U.S. academic medical centers. This work revealed a general lack of autism specialty …

Exploring The Dynamics Of Human-Robot Interaction: Robot Error, Sentiment Analysis, And Politeness, Krishna Kodur, Manizheh Zand, Matthew Tognotti, Sean Banerjee, Natasha Kholgade Banerjee, Maria Kyrarini

Electrical and Computer Engineering

As robots become more integrated into daily life, understanding natural human communication is essential for developing user-friendly human-robot interaction (HRI) systems. While prior research focuses on robot-initiated behaviors, little is known about how user-initiated politeness, sentiment, and communication patterns influence perceptions of robots in real-world tasks. This study addresses this gap by analyzing interactions between 35 participants and Alex, a mobile manipulator that understands unscripted speech, during a collaborative cooking task. The study explores four hypotheses: 1) The average number of words per command used for instructing the robot is affected by how the person perceives the robot’s interaction., (2) …

Comparing Concepts And Applications Of Reflexivity In Qualitative And Quantitative Social Sciences: Impacts For Results, Relationship, And Reputation, Cecily Shepherd

Idaho Conference on Undergraduate Research

Reflexivity, as defined by the Cambridge Dictionary (2025), is the ability to examine one's own feelings, reactions, and motives—and how these influence thought and behavior in a given situation. In the social sciences, inconsistent applications of reflexivity across qualitative and quantitative methodologies can undermine research reliability, hinder community engagement, and damage institutional reputations. The concept was first addressed in The Child in America by William and Dorothy Swain (1928), and later championed by Alvin Gouldner in The Coming Crisis of Western Sociology (1970), who called for a reflexive sociology. Today, reflexivity is widely used to mitigate bias, enhance validity, and …

Introduction To Circuit Design And Architecture For Emerging Nanoscale Technologies, Adam Jalyo, Sarah Frost

Idaho Conference on Undergraduate Research

This research addresses the critical challenge of sustaining advancements in computational performance and energy efficiency in the wake of Moore’s law reaching its physical limits.

Since computer systems face increasing demands driven by data-intensive applications such as artificial intelligence workloads, alternative nanoscale design paradigms are essential. This study discusses Quantum-dot Cellular Automata (QCA) as a potential post-CMOS technology, offering a different approach to circuit design based on quantum dot arrangements and electron interactions governed by Coulomb repulsion. The investigation begins with a foundational understanding of QCA’s building blocks, including cell architecture, binary encoding mechanisms, and majority gate logic. To illustrate …

Inverted Gradient Attacks: Testing Priacy Attacks And Data Leakage In Federated Learning, Jonathan Auyong, Shan Peck, Liam Laidlaw, Zavareh Bozorgasl, Hao Chen

Idaho Conference on Undergraduate Research

Federated Learning (FL) is an emerging machine learning approach that proposes to train models collaboratively on user’s data in distributed environments. In FL, a central server holds a global model which are sent out to clients. The clients train their models on their private data, and send back gradients or parameter differences for aggregation. FL introduces its own issues with security and privacy, where attackers can poison the model to degrade performance or attempt to steal user’s private data through inference attacks. Past research on gradient inversion, a form of inference attack, shows these sent gradients in FL can be …

Sidesense: Robust Physiological Motion Detection Via Mmwave Joint Communication And Sensing Systems With Multiple Beams, Mohammed Shadman Ishrak, Jannatun Noor Sameera, Alvin Yang, Yanjun Pan, Yao Zheng, Olga Boric-Lubecke, Victor M. Lubecke

Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Faculty Publications and Presentations

A 28-GHz multibeam joint communication and sensing system called SideSense is presented, in which a line-of-sight (LoS) beam is used to maintain reliable communication, while other sensing beams are used to enhance physiological motion detection. SideSense decodes the motion frequency and shape from the channel state information (CSI) by first tuning the gain ratio and phase differences between the LoS communication beam and non-LoS (NLoS) beam to maximize the sensing signal-to-noise ratio (SSNR) without significantly degrading the communication channel capacity (CCC). Analytical results based on a bistatic model are presented to show a gain ratio of around 1 and a …

Teaching Pathographies Of Mental Illness, Nathan Carlin, Angela Gomez, Margarita Ortiz

Faculty and Staff Publications

This paper describes the content and evolution of a fourth-year course for medical students on teaching pathographies of mental illness. (It is a follow-up to Nathan Carlin's Pathographies of Mental Illness that appeared as an Element in the Bioethics and Neuroethics series published by Cambridge University Press.) The course originally centered on classic (and some contemporary) memoirs; however, responding to student evaluations, newer material now ensures more diversity, with material written by women and people of color, and describes the difference that can make.

Heartlines Issue 6 (Fall 2025), Student Literary Magazine Creative Writing And Art

HeartLines

No abstract provided.

Full Issue - Spring 2025 - Volume 112, Issue 1, Colby College

Colby Magazine

04. Planting Seeds to Grow a Stronger Community
16. Retiring Provost McFadden: Colby’s ‘Special Sauce’ is What Makes it Great
24. Pulver Scholars Explore Scientific Possibility
32. A Warm Wilderness Welcome for New Colby Students
42. Dare Northward is Shaping Colby as a Global Leader
48. Bringing Them All Back Home

Estimating How Much Children Work: Questionnaires Versus Time Use Diaries, Juana Lamote De Grignon Pérez, Wenbin Wang, Tanay Kasyap, Matthew Henglong Luo, Jialu Tang

Discussion Papers

Current estimates of child labour often rely on questions such as, “How many hours did you work last week?” While biases in adult self-reports are well-documented in high-income countries, there is limited evidence on the accuracy of children’s responses in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). Using data from nine LMICs, including China and India, this paper shows that time diaries report more than twice as many work hours as standard questionnaires. This discrepancy suggests that current estimates may significantly understate child labour. Moreover, certain forms of work—such as collecting water or firewood—appear to contribute to these measurement gaps.

Alfred Russel Wallace Notes 37. What About Wallace On Vaccination . . . ?, Charles H. Smith

Faculty/Staff Personal Papers

Best known for his natural history studies on evolution and biogeography, Alfred Russel Wallace (1823−1913) had a significant second career as a social critic. One of his most controversial stances was his position on (smallpox) vaccination. Anti-vaxxers of the present frequently bring up his name as a resource for their side, but the situation is not so easily reducible to that.

Volume 109, Number 1 (2025)

Judicature

No abstract provided.

Nsu Kpcom Link - Summer 2025 - Volume 4.2, Nova Southeastern University

NSU Florida Link Newsletter

No abstract provided.

Freeman Honors – The Annual Newsletter: Fall 2024-Spring 2025, Texas Southern University, Thomas F. Freeman Honors College

Honor's College Newsletters

Annual 2024-2025 Newsletter

Differential Privacy Enabled Deep Skin Image Classification Model Development, Prasun Kumar Mandal

Master’s Dissertations

Abstract In the era of big data, the explosive growth in data volume has significantly accelerated the development of deep learning. Deep learning is the most promising area of AI, yielding significant advancements in medical image classification. However, healthcare data contains important sensitive information and so privacy and security are crucial to preventing unauthorized access. Note that there are several data protection rules from multiple regulations to penalize any kind of data security violation, for example, the data protection principles (Article 5.1-2) and the data protection by design and by default (Article 25) of the General Data Protection Regulation from …

A Survey Study Of Roadblocks In Translational Science., Fasiha Kanwal, Christopher I Amos, Katherine H Sippel, Claudia Neuhauser, Ariel Harrison, Mary E Dickinson, Charles Minard, Bettina M Beech

Faculty Research 2025

Clinical and translational science needs to address roadblocks to the translational processes. We conducted a survey at two institutions, a private medical school and a large public university, to understand the frequency and distribution of barriers and roadblocks to research. We reviewed the literature to compile a pool of barriers and roadblocks and convened a panel of relevant stakeholders to develop a 20-item questionnaire. Survey respondents were asked to select and prioritize the five leading clinical and translational roadblocks, provide information regarding their academic degrees and rank/position, complete open-ended items regarding their areas of research, and optionally add additional remarks …

Transcripts With High Distal Heritability Mediate Genetic Effects On Complex Metabolic Traits., Anna L. Tyler, J Matthew Mahoney, Mark P Keller, Candice N Baker, Margaret Gaca, Anuj Srivastava, Isabela Gerdes Gyuricza, Madeleine J Braun, Nadia Rosenthal, Alan D Attie, Gary Churchill, Gregory W. Carter

Faculty Research 2025

Although many genes are subject to local regulation, recent evidence suggests that complex distal regulation may be more important in mediating phenotypic variability. To assess the role of distal gene regulation in complex traits, we combine multi-tissue transcriptomes with physiological outcomes to model diet-induced obesity and metabolic disease in a population of Diversity Outbred mice. Using a novel high-dimensional mediation analysis, we identify a composite transcriptome signature that summarizes genetic effects on gene expression and explains 30% of the variation across all metabolic traits. The signature is heritable, interpretable in biological terms, and predicts obesity status from gene expression in …